Single project or multiple projects?

[carmonli]

Please advise on the best way of structuring one or more Flare projects:

Product A
* End user content - requires translation
* Service/Support content - does not require translation

Product B
* End user content - requires translation

Product C
* New product, not sure about translation yet

The release cycle is different for each of the products.

There is little (if any) shared content between the products, but the look and feel would be the same. I have already set up Flare for Product A - it's not a problem for me to import the template files into a new project, and in any case it wouldn't happen frequently.

Is there any way for me to avoid having a separate Flare project for each product? That would also mean having to create and maintain individual Git repositories. Any suggestions/recommendations would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[RamonS]

I strongly suggest separate projects. Otherwise you have to constantly tag each bit of content per product so that topics for product A do not show up in output for products B and C. I could see that be an acceptable disadvantage if there are significant amounts of shared content, but you wrote that there is barely none.
I often state that documentation should to be treated like source code. Do the developers stuff all source code from all three products into one project? I'm quite sure they do not and would just shake their heads at that idea.

[ChoccieMuffin]

I had written a reply but forgot to click Submit and lost it all! D'oh!

Anyway, I suggest that as well as having separate projects for your different products you also create a single, central project that contains all the stuff that you want to appear in all your projects. This would be:

In Content folder:
Page layouts
Master pages
Stylesheets
Table stylesheets
Common topics and snippets, such as copyright text
Common graphics such as company logos and stuff needed for page layouts and master pages
An Index topic with an Index proxy in it, a Contents topic with a TOC proxy in it, a front page topic with standard design linking to variables

In Projects folder:
Global condition tag set (individual projects may need their own condition tag set or sets)
Global reports
Skins
TOCs for things like Front matter, TOC and Index
Global variable set

In each of your product projects include an import file .flimpfl which will import stuff from your global project into your product project.

Using this approach (search in the forums and help for Global project linking) you can keep stuff in one central place so you don't end up having to maintain loads of different stylesheets to keep them consistent.

[SteveS]

^^^ That's what I'd be looking at as well...

[carmonli]

As people have suggested, I think that separate projects will be the way to go.

At my previous job, we had a separate Flare project for all the "template" stuff - currently, it is all inside the single Flare project that I've created so far. Makes sense to have a separate project for that as well, which everyone can access.

Thanks for the advice.