MadWorld Schedule: Advanced Flare Workshop

Join this hands-on workshop to sharpen your CSS skills and elevate your stylesheet management in MadCap Flare. You'll learn proven best practices for setting up, maintaining, and troubleshooting stylesheets—whether you're targeting print or online outputs. We’ll also explore powerful, lesser-known CSS techniques and new features that can enhance your projects.

You'll walk away with practical solutions to common CSS challenges and resources you can apply immediately.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• Efficiently set up, manage, and troubleshoot stylesheets
• Apply advanced formatting techniques for print and online outputs
• Research and resolve CSS issues effectively
• Leverage key tools and resources to improve stylesheet development

We all know that having content that supports users directly in the UI is a great experience for users. But it can be difficult to implement and maintain; and always competes for scarce developer time. These challenges often lead to compromises for the users' experience, or mean the in-app help doesn’t get into the product at all.

Since microcontent was introduced to Flare it has been easier to create short-form content that can be embedded into a UI as tool tips, for example. But to provide a richer, more engaging user experience we need more that tool tips. We need to provide a layered approach that supports longer-form content, navigation and search.

In this session I will describe how we designed and implemented a multi-layered, in-app help that included sliding panels with long-form help, search, and menus, that was simple for the development team to implement, and easy for the authors to maintain.

HTML, CSS, and jQuery have been around for decades, but there are still many obscure, poorly-documented, and overlooked features that can be extremely useful in HTML5 targets. In this session, we will discuss common challenges in HTML5 targets and I will present solutions using HTML, CSS, jQuery and even "hidden" features of MadCap Flare.

In this session, you will learn:

• Useful but rarely used features of HTML and CSS and how to use them in your projects
• jQuery functions you can add to your projects (and how to use them)
• "Hidden" features of Flare

Have you been contemplating adding a light/dark mode switcher to your documentation, but it feels daunting? Or you have multiple products and stylesheets, and the very idea of setting up more styles sounds like agony? Worry no more.

In this two-part, hands-on session, you’ll learn how to add a light/dark mode switcher—complete with logos and icons for both modes—using a few simple(ish!) steps. You’ll learn how to add a light/dark mode button to your skin, how to add html data themes and CSS variables to your stylesheet, and how to customize MadCap’s built-in branding stylesheets.

This session is recommended for intermediate/advanced Flare users who are comfortable working in Flare’s code editor. While extensive JavaScript and CSS experience is not required, we will be using basic JavaScript and intermediate/advanced CSS samples during this session.

MadCap Flare Online is a great way to manage, build, and host an HTML site published from a Flare target. But what if you need a more complicated portal structure to accommodate a large number of products, for example? How can you use Flare Online to build and host a documentation portal with multiple sub-sites published from multiple targets, or multiple Flare projects?

Our customer wanted to migrate to MadCap Flare Online to take advantage of the collaboration features offered by Flare Online. However, they needed to maintain the overall structure of their documentation site with a sub-site for each product. So we needed to find a way to provide a seamless experience for their users to navigate through all the sub-sites, and to find the information they need.

In this session, I will cover some key capabilities available in Flare Online and Flare for building and publishing sites, and the various options we tried to combine these capabilities to publish the multi-site portal. In addition, I will discuss how we leveraged additional tools, such as third-party search, to provide a seamless user experience.

The challenge of unifying content across different products in a single product suite requires creative thinking and advanced Flare techniques. Mabel Lee, manager in a large, globally distributed User Education team, will explain the architecture and strategies her team uses to share single-sourced infrastructure and common content between many Flare projects and outputs. In addition, she will share how her team manages and distributes these assets to team members of varying Flare experience levels. The techniques covered in this session include global project linking, starter projects, source control, snippets, conditionals, and merged TOCs. She will also discuss the monthly processes used to share branding, UX, style elements, and quickly evolving common content. Attendees will learn best practices and key decision criteria for creating unified content strategies that enhance collaboration and ensure consistency across many projects and various output formats.