What's New in Paligo?

It’s finally here, the #1 requested improvement from our users! Previously, if you dragged a topic into your publication structure, it was added at the end of the publication. You had to then move it to your preferred position. With the latest version, we’ve eliminated that extra step. Now you can drag-and-drop your topics to the specific position you want. No re-ordering required.

The new drag-and-drop behavior works with single and multiple selections, so you can assemble complex publications faster than ever before.

If you want to add content into structures without having to drag-and-drop, you can now use copy and paste as well.

Simply select your document(s) in the Content Manager, open the dotted menu and select “Copy”. Then, open the Structure Editor for a publication. Each topic has a dotted menu with a “Paste” option for adding the copied content before or after in the structure.

Have you ever created a topic branch and then had a hard time finding it? This could be especially prevalent if you had branched a topic in a publication. But you’ll be glad to hear we’ve made it much easier to work with your new branches.

When you create your topic branch, you’ll now be presented with two new options (Label and Open new branch in editor).

In this new dialog, you can easily create a label for your branch. We encourage always setting a label, as it makes it easier to organize and keep track of your branches. There’s also an option to automatically open your new branch in the editor after it’s created, saving you a few clicks.

As before, your new branch will always be placed next to the originating topic, but sometimes that’s not where you are in the Content Manager. So now we’ve improved the Content Manager so that it navigates to the resulting branch and highlights it for you.

We appreciate all of your feedback and suggestions for improving the Content Manager, and hope you enjoy these updates.

We’ve added a completely new layout for publishing to Salesforce: Salesforce nested. This layout uses Navigational topics in Salesforce to replicate the publication hierarchy when you publish.

You can customize how deep in the hierarchy we create navigational topics by using the “Chunk section depth” layout option. So now you can publish to navigational topics and articles and have much more control over the hierarchy, both in Paligo and Salesforce.

See Mapping with a Salesforce Nested Layout for more info about how this new layout works.

We’re happy to add Coveo search as another option for our HTML5 Help Center outputs. Integrating your output with Coveo gives you a fast AI-powered search solution with support for faceted and federated search.

To use Coveo, you set it up in a Layout. Paligo will then display search results from Coveo in the published output. You can use custom CSS and Javascript to customize the search results to suit your style and brand. 

For more info about Coveo, see Coveo Integration. The Coveo integration is available on the Enterprise plan.

In the March release, we added support for SEO-friendly URLs to the Salesforce integration. Now, we have enhanced it further with support for data categories.

Data categories have a number of uses in Salesforce. They can be used to classify and organize content and make it easier to find, as well as control who can view and access certain content. And now you can set the data categories on your content straight from Paligo when you publish.

For more info about how to publish content to Salesforce using data categories, seeSalesforce Knowledge Integration.

Earlier this year we gave the Structure View some love, moving stuff around in order to make it a bit nicer to use. Now we’re following that up with a few more improvements.

You can now insert new topics at any place in a structure, as well as copy and paste certain parts of a structure within the same publication. To find out about the new menu options, see Publication Structure Menus.

To learn about reusing a fork (topic reference), either inside the same publication or in a different publication, see Reuse Forks.

The Contributor Editor now shows you if a document is checked out already, and also which user is editing it.

But wouldn’t it be nice to also be able to assign multiple contributors to a single assignment? Well, we could have some news on that coming soon.

Editor

Contributor editor beta

Review interface

Structure editor

Timeline

Algolia

Fluid Topics

Branching

Translations

HTML5 outputs

PDF outputs

Paligo API

Other

The Timeline is a completely new interface for viewing the history of a document over time. It gives you a centralized view of changes that have been made to the document, and is customizable, so you can filter what types of changes are shown.

Another benefit of the Timeline is that it allows you to compare any of the historic snapshots of the document. So you’re no longer limited to only comparing with the latest snapshot.

You can view the comparisons in the web interface or export them as PDF for sharing and viewing outside of Paligo, using any of your PDF layouts. The exported PDF has markup similar to “track changes” so that you can see what has been added, modified and deleted.

The Timeline is available on Business and Enterprise plans. For more info, see Timeline

We’ve made some UX improvements to the structure view so that it’s easier for you to assemble your publications. You’ll see that we have moved some of the reordering buttons, so they always remain in the same place. This makes it easier to use when moving topics up and down in the structure, as the buttons do not change position.

There are more Structure view changes coming soon. Next up, we’ll be making it much easier to insert new topics anywhere in an existing structure, with other features following that.

No more manually editing URLs in Salesforce! The new SEO friendly links option makes Paligo create readable and SEO friendly URLs for your articles, based on the topic title. So now you can have much improved URL names with no extra effort required.

Layouts

Contributor editor beta

Publishing

Imports

Editor

Paligo API

Security

Many Paligo customers are responsible for sensitive or highly-regulated content, and therefore need assurances on content integrity and secure access. We heard you, and now we’ve delivered! Take full control of who can edit the content in your Paligo instance.

Set permissions on a topic and only permitted users will be allowed to edit it. Alternatively, you can set permissions on a publication and restricted users won’t be able to add new topics or modify its structure. If you want to apply permissions in bulk you can use folder-level permissions to control access to all of the content inside of the chosen folder in a single step.

Whether you need to temporarily lock content from being edited, or if you want to collaborate across teams safely, the permissions feature will allow you to more confidently manage your content.

The Permissions feature is available on the Enterprise plan. For more info see: Permissions.

Continuing on the subject of increasing content security, we wanted to let you know about a new feature we're really excited about that's coming soon: Suggestions. This is a completely new way of editing content, built on the powerful new contributor editor.

With this new edit mode, users can suggest changes to documents without actually modifying the document itself. If you've ever used track changes or suggestions modes in other software you'll get the idea. It will allow full authors to remain completely in control of what content is added, modified or deleted from their documents.

Suggestions is now entering it's final phase of beta as we prepare for its full release.

Paligo is adding a variety of new user types to give customers more control and security, greatly enhancing the authoring workflow. The pre-existing user types are administrator, author, contributor and reviewer. The new user types, which are available to purchase as additional licenses, are:

Phrase is a translation management system (TMS) for localization professionals who need to cover the full range of enterprise localization use cases. Paligo integrates seamlessly with Phrase meaning translation jobs can be sent to, and received from, Phrase without the need to manually transfer any files.

We’ve just added the ability to select what Phrase region to use when setting up your Phrase integration in your Paligo instance. This means that both the EU and US regions are supported.

Translation

Editor

Layouts

Activity Feed

Assignments

Contributor editor beta

Review View

Content Manager

Zendesk

We've added a new type of component called a cover component. These are designed especially for PDF outputs and they allow you to customize and design both sides of the front and back covers, right out of the box.

You can then use the Layout settings to style the cover content and control its position.

For more information on customizing your PDF covers, see Cover Pages and Front Matter.

We’ve added a new layout option that can reduce the output package size if you publish multi-lingual images to HTML5. It is called Per-language image folders and it allows you to set the layout to collect all images in a common folder, instead of creating new folders for each language.

For more information, see Use a Common Image Folder.

It's now much easier to directly reference a topic fork. When you search for documents in the “New cross reference” widget in the editor, you now have the option to include forks in the search results.

We have a chapter in our docs that describes why you would want to link to a fork, in case you’re new to that concept: Topic or Fork. And you can see the following topic for more info about adding cross references to other topics: Add Cross-Reference to a Topic.

You can now define up to 5 different table styles in your PDF layouts. You can then set the tables in your document to use any of the five styles, depending on the situation. 

For example, you could have a specifications table that uses the styles from Tabstyle1 and then set tables in your instruction topics to use styles from Tabstyle2.

To learn about using table styles for PDFs, see Apply a Table Style (PDF).

We’ve added a layout setting for the eLearning layout that allows you to control if the questions are displayed one-by-one or all at once.

If you want to override this for a specific quiz, you can add the role attribute to the qandaset element and set its value to quiz-show-all or quiz-show-single. And you can always further customize the styling by using your own custom CSS and Javascript.

For more details, see Style the Question Rendering.

It is now much easier to set the start page for your Help Center output, thanks to a new layout setting: Choose start page by role for HTML5 Help Center. If you enable this setting and then add a role attribute with a value of start-page to any section, this will set the browser to use that as the start page.

For more information, see Customize the Start Page.

We’ve mentioned our new contributor editor a few times before, and we’re happy to have reached another milestone. We’re making it possible for any admin to enable this new editor on their instance.

The new editor, rebuilt from the ground up, is more robust, pleasant to work in, and supports a few more elements than the old one. Functionality-wise it’s mostly the same as the old one, so you should feel right at home with it. And if you have any feedback on it, please do let us know!

Any Paligo admin user can enable the new contributor editor beta from the system settings. You can enable or disable it globally, and you can also allow each individual user to choose whether they want to use it.

Have you ever wanted to change the file name format of the output archives or PDF files produced by Paligo? Well now you can!

We have added the ability to change the order of the content in the file names, add custom text, and add more metadata such as the current date. And you can save the file name templates and reuse them in the saved publishing settings.

To find out more, see Customize Output Filename.

Good news for those of you that use the Phrase (previously Memsource) integration—we've added some highly requested improvements.

Select Project on Export

In addition to the default project that you can apply in the integration settings, you can now select from a list of Phrase projects in the translation export menu. This will make it much easier to work with multiple Phrase projects simultaneously.

Create a New Project from Paligo

Not only can you easily publish to multiple projects, you can now create new Phrase projects, all from within Paligo. In the export translation dialog, you’ll now find a new option to create a new project.

From there, you can choose what template to base this project on, as well as add an optional due date.

Set Due Dates on Tasks

We've also improved due dates for tasks. Now you can choose an optional due date from the export dialog and that date will be set on the Phrase task automatically.

To find out about the phrase integration improvements, see Export a Translation Package.

We’re continuing to improve our premium eLearning output, and we’ve now added the ability to customize the passing score for the course from within Paligo. 

By default, users need 70% or more correct answers to pass the course. But now you configure this to any percentage that you want. And because this is set in an element in your publication, you can apply profiling to the pass limit. So you can set up multiple pass limits and use filtering (profiling) to choose which limit to apply when you publish.

For more details, see Set a Minimum Passing Score.

We’re excited to finally add one of the most requested features to the Paligo API: Search. Now you can use the API to easily search through your Paligo documents and taxonomies, using advanced search filters.

The Search endpoint is in beta as of now, because there are certain resources, like folders, that aren’t supported yet. But you can expect the supported resources and filters to be fully functional. 

For more info about this new endpoint, see our API docs.

There are a number of other enhancements and bug fixes in this release. As usual, you can see the full list of changes by clicking the “Release notes” button at the bottom of your Paligo dashboard.

The XML tree view panel in the editor is one of the easiest ways to move around the content in your document. And with this release, we’re adding the ability to duplicate and delete elements from this view as well.

To find out more, see:

In October, we made a big new addition to the Paligo API. The new forks endpoint will allow you to create and modify entire document structures remotely. This can be particularly useful if part of your content needs to be authored or generated outside of Paligo, and you want to bring it into Paligo and keep it in sync.

You can read more about this new endpoint in the Paligo API docs.

If you publish to Salesforce, we've got great news for you. This release includes the first batch of several planned improvements to the integration. Let’s start with the biggest  one ...

Publish to live articles instead of draft

Previously, when you published to Salesforce, we automatically published the articles as drafts. This would require you to set these articles as live in Salesforce every time after publishing. For some users, this was an unnecessary step, and made the publishing process more time-consuming.

Now, using the new integration setting for Salesforce, you can automatically set these articles as live when you publish.

To find out more, see Connect Paligo to Salesforce Knowledge.

Cross-referencing sub-elements

We’ve also improved cross-reference resolution. This means that cross-references to sub-elements in external topics will work properly when publishing to Salesforce.

Improved videos and images

You can now publish videos as well as SVG assets to Salesforce.

The team has made some improvements to Zendesk Preflight which means that it should load quicker now. Additionally, if Preflight ever failed to load for you previously, that should also be solved.

In addition to our already existing features for restoring deleted content, we’re adding another way to safeguard against accidentally deleting content. A new system setting has been added (Enable deleting content) which, when disabled, forces content to first be moved to trash before it can be deleted.

To find out more, see Allow Users to Delete or Force them to Send to Trash.

There are a number of other enhancements and bug fixes in this release. You can find a list of some of the improvements below, and as always, you can see the full list of changes by clicking the "Release notes" button at the bottom of your Paligo dashboard.

Contributor editor beta

eLearning output

Improved how nested sections are marked as completed.

Translation editor

Fixed an issue where the context menu could overlap certain UI elements and become inaccessible.

PDF outputs

HTML and HTML5 outputs

Cross references will now get a “linktype-*” class that describes if the link is to a component or a fork.

Other

We’re excited to now natively integrate with Fluid Topics (Paligo Enterprise plan required). Fluid Topics is a Content Delivery Platform, and with the new integration, you can publish to your Fluid Topics knowledge hub straight from Paligo. 

To find out more, see Fluid Topics Integration.

In addition to working on new features and integrations, we’re always looking for areas where we can improve the performance of Paligo. We have several pretty significant improvements on the way, and the first one is improved loading times in the editor.

We’ve greatly improved page load times when you open a topic in the editor with lots of paragraphs. A topic with over 1000 paragraphs could easily take up to a minute to load. That topic will now load in a couple of seconds.

During the last few months, we’ve made a few updates to the Paligo API.

In December, we added the ability to create and modify taxonomies, and we’ve now also added the ability to delete them.

We’ve also added some functionality that makes it easier to work with translations. When you request a document, you will now receive information about what languages are used on it.

As usual, see our Paligo API docs for the full details on the functionality of the API.

Zendesk Preflight has received a small improvement which makes it possible to customize the Zendesk labels applied to a specific article straight from Paligo. This new option can be found when opening the properties for a specific article in Zendesk Preflight.

Additionally, we’ve also improved how images are published to Zendesk to avoid duplicates in the Zendesk media storage.

And like always, we’ve made several other improvements and fixes. A full list of these can be found by clicking on the “Release notes” link at the bottom of your Paligo Dashboard.

A lot is happening at Paligo right now, and we can’t help but mention some of the things that are on the horizon.

We've completely reworked the code for the publication merge feature, making it more robust, easier to use, and capable of handling more complex branch merge scenarios.

It also has a new, clearer interface with extra features to make publication merges easier than ever before. You can view the two publication branches side-by-side, see a preview, and select and drill into individual topics to control what is included or excluded in the merged publication.

There's also the option to work with just the preview panel, and you can control the merge from there. Another new feature is the ability to get Paligo to automatically branch every topic in a publication.

To find out how to use the new publication merge features, see Merge a Publication Branch.

Previously, if you accidentally deleted content (a "hard delete"), the only way to get it back was to ask us to recover it for you. To make things easier (and faster!), we have added a Restore Document feature so that you can restore content yourself. The Restore Document feature is available in the Activity Feed on your Dashboard.

To find out more, see Restore Deleted Content.

We've introduced user groups to make it much easier and faster to allocate assignments to multiple users. As part of the user management features, you can now create user groups and add users to those. Then, when you create an assignment, you can allocate it to the user group instead of individually to each user.

To find out more, see User Groups.

We've changed the way publication templates handle topics. Now, when you create a new publication from a template, the new publication will contain new copies of the template topics. Previously, it would contain the actual template topics.

To find out more about publication templates and topic templates, see Templates.

We’re continuing our work on the Paligo API and have added several commonly requested new features. You can now do all of the following through the Paligo API:

To find out more, see the API documentation.

We've added support for PDF document properties so that you can add important metadata, choose the PDF mode, and define the initial settings for the PDF viewer.

To find out more, see PDF Document Properties and Metadata.

In case you missed the details of our minor summer release, it included these improvements:

Yes, the Paligo API is here! Now your developers can connect external applications to Paligo and automate a variety of tasks, including:

The REST API is available on the Business plan and up. For an overview of the Paligo API and information on how to generate an API key, see Paligo REST API.

For the developer documentation, see https://paligo.net/docs/apidocs/.

We've added an XML tree view to the Editor's sidebar to make it easier to and move and restructure the block elements in a topic. The XML tree view shows the structure of the currently displayed topic and you can easily drag and drop elements around. The editor view instantly updates to match the structure in the XML tree view.

The XML Tree View is available on all plans. To find out more, see Editor and Move Elements.

Paligo now lets you collaborate with your teammates in Microsoft Teams, allowing you to send direct messages to other users, as well as get notifications of assignments, document shares, comments, and publishing events. With the Microsoft Teams integration, Paligo can send two types of notification:

So if your team uses Microsoft Teams for communicating with each other, you can now get your Paligo information there too!

The Microsoft Teams integration is available on the Business plan and up. To find out more, see MS Teams Integration.

We have also added support for ServiceNow, with a new integration that allows Paligo to publish content directly to the ServiceNow platform. So you can use Paligo's powerful authoring features to create your content, but use ServiceNow to present that content to your audience.

The ServiceNow integration is available on the Enterprise plan. To find out more, see ServiceNow Integration.

Paligo now supports publishing content to multiple levels of sections in Zendesk Enterprise Guide (available on the Enterprise plan). For example, you can now publish to a structure such as Category > Section > Section > Section > Article rather than the traditional Category > Section > Article.

Publishing from Paligo to multiple sections in Zendesk is available for customers on the Paligo Enterprise plan. And you must also have an enterprise license for Zendesk too.

To find out more, see Zendesk Enterprise Layouts.

There are also a number of other enhancements, bug fixes, and other updates in this release.

Paligo now lets you collaborate with your teammates right in Slack, allowing you to send direct messages to other users, as well as get notifications of assignments, document shares, comments, and publishing events to your Slack workspace. The Slack integrations has two types of notifications:

So if your team uses Slack for interacting with each other, making video calls, etc., now you can get your Paligo information there too!

To find out more, see Slack Integration.

A while ago we released the popular feature to publish to GitHub, BitBucket, FTP, and Amazon S3.

Now we're adding to our growing number of publishing channels with Microsoft Azure Repos. Create content in Paligo and publish directly to any Azure Repos project and branch.

To find out more, see Azure Repos Integration.

We've made it much easier to work with revisions for publication structures, so if you change a publication structure, it's now much easier to revert back to an earlier version if needed. This is going to make it much quicker to modify your publications, as there's no need to recreate a previous structure from scratch.

Every time you make a change to a publication structure, Paligo will store a revision. You can then revert to that revision (or any previous revisions).

Paligo will even recreate topics from that publication revision if they had been deleted.

To find out more, see Revert a Publication to a Different Revision.

Many of you asked for a more robust spellchecker, so here it is! For the new spellchecker, we have taken a different approach and have built it almost from scratch. The result is a spellchecker that's faster, more reliable, and more stable.

There are also a number of other enhancements, bug fixes, and other updates in this release.

We know many of you have been asking for this and looking forward to this for a long time. With this release it is now possible to publish directly to your web server via FTP. But not only that, now you've also got direct integration with three additional popular platforms and Git workflows.

All of these options will allow you to fully automate the entire publishing process to go live with your content as soon as you hit the publish button.

Publish Directly to Your Web Server Via FTP

If you're publishing to your own web server, you can now greatly simplify and automate the publishing process by directly pushing your content there via the direct FTP publishing option.

See FTP Integration for more on how to do this.

Publish to Amazon Web Services S3 (Amazon S3)

Paligo now offers publishing directly to the very popular Amazon Web Services S3 (Amazon S3). This means you can create content in Paligo, such as PDFs or an HTML help center, and publish it to Amazon S3 so that it is instantly live to your end users.

See Amazon S3 Integration for more on how to do this.

Publish to BitBucket

For you Continuous Integration fans out there, now you can get your Paligo publishing right into your Git workflow. Publish directly to any Git branch you choose, and then automate the publishing with BitBucket Pipelines so it's instantly live for your end users.

See Bitbucket Integration for more on how to do this.

Publish to GitHub

Just like the BitBucket integration, those of you who work with GitHub can have the same Continuous Integration workflow, publishing your Paligo content directly to any branch. Automate the publishing (or any workflow you need) with GitHub webhooks.

See GitHub Integration for more on how to do this.

The team has been working a lot on the backend of Paligo, updating, tweaking, and fine tuning on every end to make your Paligo experience as great as possible. With this release the performance will be significantly enhanced overall, and you'll see a noticeably snappier interface.

This update is part of a larger infrastructure project that is still ongoing, and there will be further enhancements in the near future too.

There are also a number of other enhancements, bug fixes, and other updates in this release.

We've had the integration to publish your technical documentation to Zendesk since 2016, and we know it's a highly appreciated feature. But even though this has worked great, you would need to go to your Zendesk account after publishing to make sure everything came out as you wanted.

Wouldn't it be great if you could see exactly how your content will map to Zendesk articles, even be able to modify and configure it right from Paligo?

Well, now you can. With Zendesk Preflight, you are in full control. This new feature gives you a full visual preview of how your content will be mapped to Zendesk articles, and with the ability to configure it as you like.

Read more about it in Map Content from Paligo to Zendesk (and the subsequent sections).

The Zendesk Preflight feature gives you control over which topics are published (added or updated) to Zendesk. You can choose to publish an entire publication, just a selection of its topics, or even a single topic if you prefer.

If you should find that you have made significant updates using new topics, but want to update an existing article in Zendesk, you can remap the content to that article.

Now you can even change how your content is published on a very granular level, changing:

If you are managing your entire publishing process to Zendesk from Paligo, previously if you had removed topics or sections in your Paligo publication, you would have had to remove the old articles from within Zendesk. This update changes that. Now you can choose to remove them right from within the Paligo Zendesk Preflight panel.

There is so much more, go explore it yourself, and read more about the mapping customization in Customize Paligo-to-Zendesk Mapping.

The big feature update was about Zendesk, obviously, but there are also a number of other enhancements, bug fixes, and other updates in this release.

Now you'll be able to use additional security with 2-factor authentication. Enterprise plans will also have additional settings to apply the highest security, including password policies, and 2FA enforcing.

In addition, device management and notifications for logins on new devices have been added.

This is the biggest update in this release, and you'll find a whole section about it here: Two-Factor Authentication (2FA).

This is something many of you have requested for a long time. You now have the ability to copy the saved publishing settings for a document, i.e the selected filter values, variable settings, languages, and more. Read more about it in Copy Publishing Settings.

The Algolia search engine options have had several new updates in this release:

Read more about the updates for Algolia in Algolia Search Engine Integration.

For our popular Zendesk publishing integration there are several really nice enhancements in this release.

This release adds further SEO improvements: