MadWorld 2022 Schedule: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 1

Advanced Customization of the TopNav and SideNav Skins Using CSS

Presented by: Matthew Ellison

The skin editors provided by MadCap Flare enable you to customize a range of visual aspects including colors, fonts, and icons. However, many useful and exciting effects can be achieved by hand-coding the appropriate advanced styles into your topic stylesheet. This presentation shows you how to achieve a range of special effects including different colored borders beneath each of the Top Nav menus, additional text, and logos within the Header bar, and the flexibility to omit specific topics from the Top Nav or Side Nav menus even though they are included within the TOC. You will learn how to use Chrome Developer Tools to identify the required styles, as well as how to use some key CSS techniques to implement the effects.

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 2

Why Documenting Your Project is Crucial to Staying Organized

Presented by: Neil Perlin

The best authoring tools are of little use if you lose control of the project. New authors may not understand how a feature was used or why. And it’s painful to leave your project for a few months, return to it, and not remember what you did. The solution? Document the project. Many authors don’t because they think it takes too long but you can document a project in three days. The result isn’t a style guide; it’s a full description of the project with details like topic attributes, file structure, graphics settings, approved tools, and more. With this information at hand, authors can better stay on track and new authors won't have to try to read their predecessors’ minds. This workshop describes how to quickly document a project. It focuses on what items to document but also looks at how to manage the document to keep it up to date and viable. Problems will still crop up with the project – they always do – but once you document your project, losing control won’t be one of them.

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 1

Designing a Learning Environment with MadCap Flare

Presented by: Chris Jones

Join this workshop for a deep dive into how to develop a learning environment in MadCap Flare. We will start with a pre-defined Flare template and take it to the next level, showcasing how to use proxies, TOCs, micro-content, and single-sourcing elements to make a user-centric learning hub. Discover how to “bring it all together” by building elements like a course catalog, learning paths, and deploying assets from instructional design tools like Adobe Captivate or Articulate Storyline. Whether you need software simulations in HTML5 format or quick screencast videos, you can use Flare to publish and host a sophisticated portal. From this workshop, you will walk away with a completed project with plug and play CSS, scripts, and topics to take these ideas into your own projects. You will also build an understanding of how individual Flare features can work together to create dynamic learning experiences, and practical ways to use Analytics to help prioritize future work.

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 2

MadCap Central A-Z: From Setup to Diving Into the End Results

Presented by: Paul Stoecklein

The number of features and processes in MadCap Central has grown quickly and extensively since it was first introduced a few years ago. In this workshop, Paul Stoecklein will walk you through all of the most important pieces of this robust cloud-based software. This includes projects, source control, task and checklist management, topic reviews, outputs, analytics, and more. You will see how to put it all together, from beginning to end, and make the most of the unique relationship between Central and Flare. You’ll learn the details from every corner of Central, including some new and exciting features that are sure to make you want to jump on this moving train.

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 1

Micro Content: Best Practices for Creating, Designing, and Reusing

Presented by: Scott DeLoach

Micro content is a short block of content that can be easily consumed by users and reused for search results, context-sensitive help, chatbots, VR/AR systems, and more. But, there are several challenges and tasks involved in effectively creating and using micro content. How do we transition existing system-oriented or even EPPO-based content to micro content? How do we connect micro content to outside systems? How do you write and design micro content? In this workshop, I will define and answer common questions about micro content based on best practices. We will explore real-world examples of micro content, discuss a micro content-based development workflow, and walk-through methods for reusing micro content in external systems such as chatbots, Google's search, and AR/VR systems.

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 2

Rapid Prototyping in MadCap Flare: Designing and Developing Wireframe Sites

Presented by: Homer Christensen

A rapid prototyping kit is essential for any MadCap Flare content developer who needs to respond quickly to a client, manager, or stakeholder request. Consisting of plug-and-play snippets, variables, and snariables—as well as master pages and CSS files—this Flare project enables you to quickly wireframe pages and complete requests well before your next deadline. And because it’s fully customizable and uses CSS variables, mockups can have the look, feel, functionality, and user experience of the final working website. Once the design is approved, most of the underlying coding is done, and you can focus on fine-tuning and customizing the visual elements and adding content. For this workshop, you’ll need to be comfortable with the CSS and HTML, and familiar with snippets and master pages. We’ll walk through the project and demonstrate building a site prototype, as well as provide time for you to create your own project.

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 1

A Workshop Presented by MadCap Software

Presented by: Mike Hamilton

Coming Soon

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop

Advanced Workshop 2

Build-A-Book: An Exploration of MadCap Flare Features for Building PDF Manuals

Presented by: Nita Beck

In this workshop, Nita Beck, Tech Comm Strategist of Nita Beck Communications will guide us through various MadCap Flare features and share her best practices for designing great looking, easy-to-navigate manuals in a PDF format. We’ll work from the inside out, starting with chapters and appendices. Then, we’ll add the next layer at the front—tables of contents (including lists of figures and tables) and a couple of layers at the back—a glossary and index. Finally, we’ll wrap the book up with front and back covers. On the way, we’ll encounter many Flare file types, including page layouts; topics with various proxies and keywords; stylesheets with print-centric CSS including fonts and auto-number formats; TOC files (with which we’ll control things like page breaks); snippets, variables, and conditions for variant output; and, of course, the PDF targets themselves. We’ll wrap up by looking at Flare’s ability to automatically add a table of contents, glossary, and index to print output, instead of crafting these components from scratch.

Session Topics: Advanced Workshop