MadCap Software Forums

Coming here for thoughts on whitelabeling documentation, as we are going to have a huge request for this going forward. We currently host on AWS. My product team is asking whether it is possible to have a custom product name in a back end config or the database and then push that out so that Flare could do it on the fly from a single URL. The example is this:

If we could do something like &product=FB in the URL that Flare would accept for the variable and then just have &product=WF passed in to replace the name that would save all the extra publish outputs.

I currently have variables and separate outputs and AWS buckets (URLs) for each differently named version. I'm not sure that Flare and/or AWS are capable of something like this or how you would even start to set it up.

Do you have any ideas or suggestions? Does your company white label? How do you handle it?

Thanks!

That would be nice, but I don't know if Flare is capable of that at present. What I did a few years ago was to create a target for each customer. I was documenting a journal production system that was used by a lot of scientific and medical journal societies. Each society had different ways of doing citations, references, etc. We did a base help of topics that were in all versions and then the differing topics for each journal. We built the ten targets, uploaded them to AWS and it worked well. Everyone got their own branded documentation.

Flare has features like variables and conditions that let you build several variants of an output, but these are processed at build time, and so the output itself is static. So you'd build one target/output for each variant.
But Flare doesn't have any features that let you dynamically control what's displayed "on the fly" in a single output.

You can build some functionality yourself, as you would with any website, but I think you'll be limited to what you can achieve.
For example, it's relatively simple to dynamically hide/show content in a Flare topic, as you can tag content and use a script to display content with a particular tag. However, you'll have problems trying to dynamically adjust any Flare controls like navigation menus or the search, as you don't have control how these are generated.