MadCap Software Forums

Hello fellow documentarians!

My company, which has used Flare for a while (before I got here, I am in my first year still), and we recently adopted Central. I am working on building the infrastructure/process for our Flare-Central environment and really need an expert's guidance to make sure what I have in mind makes sense. Before I get into it, I'll say that I am new to the technical writing profession and still pretty green when it comes to Flare and Central, so please forgive me if something doesn't make sense. I am happy to clarify any of my, well, nonsense. Ha!!

Our firm works in finance software, we use Flare for our online help site, which contains thousands of pages of items that include screenshots and written content to help our clients navigate our robust set of tools that are available to them. Each release comes with anywhere from 10-30 enhancements or new tools that we offer through our proprietary software product. I have watched just about every video Paul has made for Central to better understand how it works (very helpful, great resource.. Thanks Paul!) We have a team of four, and we split up the enhancements/tools in each release to own and craft/update our doc. My main question is about branching, but first let me explain how we use Flare on our team...

Currently, we have a "check out" system with our Flare projects. We store the projects in a network drive and will take the project from the drive to make our changes/updates. This can only be done by one person at a time - when that individual is done with their work, they build output then publish and back it up to the network drive. It works, but it's a rather clunky process that eats up a lot of time and bogs down productivity, thus why we have adopted Central.

Here's how I have envisioned our branching environment:
-Master branch (live content available to our clients on our site)
-Release branch (essentially a "staging" area where we will sync our new content into before we merge into the master branch when the release has been rolled out)
-Four (4) branches that each one of our team members will work out of to put together any new content relating to a new release, I was thinking of just naming them for each team member (example: steve, mary, john, jane)

Using the git branching model, each team member would work on their assignments in their individual branch and sync (push/pull) them to the release branch regularly as we complete our tasks/new content. When we're done, we'll merge the release branch into the master branch, build the output and set it live for clients to use and see.

Does this make sense? Would that be an efficient way to use Central and Flare together with branching?

Hi and welcome to the forums!

I personally think that Central is very restrictive with what it allows you to do in terms of source control, so if I was setting up your project, I would likely mirror a similar approach to what I use in my company, which would be a dual-bound project.

There are two authors in my company, myself and a junior. Our projects are all bound to Azure DevOps (ADO) and Central. We do all of our branching work in branches created from Master in ADO.

I use GitKraken desktop to have better visibility of the repo history, but this is optional. When work is complete it is merged into ADO via a Pull Request (PR) to ensure there are no conflicts. When these are resolved and everything is squashed into Master then I pull Master into Flare and push it into Central.

So the short version is that Central only ever gets pushed to and it only ever gets the contents of the ADO Master branch pushed to it. We use ADO for the git management because it's much better (but you can use GitHub if you don't use ADO).

Thanks for the reply! I see what you mean here, I'll do some research on these solutions. We're a straight-forward single-bound shop for now but always looking for versatility and flexibility with our projects. I appreciate the suggestions and input!