Content Structure

[rosemj]

Before I ask my questions, please know that I'm about as new as it gets to Flare, and that I'm not a technical writer - I'm an instructional designer, used to LCMS systems and authoring tools. That may explain my confusion in using Flare, and also the very basic nature of my questions.

I'm confused as to the content structure in Flare. I'm opening a project owned by the company I work for, and I'm not "getting" the structure I'm seeing. For example, in one of the top folders, I'm seeing five more levels of folders - that is, sub-folders, and sub-sub-folders, etc.

So my question is, is the creation of structure open-ended, in as much as it can go as deep as the user wants it to? Are there any best practices around this?

Another thing I'm seeing, is many distinct documents within one project. Is this common practice? Again, are there any best practices around this?

Thanks for any help.

[RamonS]

The structure is entirely up to the user and only limited by the Windows file system that still contains limitations from the DOS age, namely the maximum path/file name length of 255 characters.
My recommendation is to keep the structure as flat as possible. Before you go and flatten the structure be advised that doing so will require remapping of any links because they now need to target a file that lives in a different location. While Flare should be able to work that all out for you it may not and forget the one or the other link. So if the structure is a major obstacle and you want to move stuff around by all means take a backup of the entire project first and do moves bit by bit followed by a thorough test and analysis of dead links.
If the structure is only looking odd, but otherwise is something you can live with then leave it the way it is. There are better things to spend your time on than pushing files around and potentially breaking stuff.

[LTinker68]

I tend to organize my topics in the Content Explorer to be roughly the same as the "chapters" in my table of contents, with some additional folders for supporting material. It really doesn't matter how you have things structured in the Content Explorer, although I wouldn't rename or move the Resources folder. Other than that, it's really just a matter of what makes more sense to you. I wouldn't go too deep, though, as RamonS said, not only for the character limit in the file paths, but who wants to keep clicking folders to go deeper and deeper? I rarely go more than 2 folders deep in the Content Explorer.

The Project Organizer you can't really modify, since it's more the project support material that's used to build the output but isn't viewable to the end user.

[rosemj]

Thanks for the replies.

You did answer my question - I think what I'm seeing is a messy structure with some consistency issues. It was probably a bad example to see for the first look.