H&M Plugin / Add-On

Nothing is perfect! This is where you can post your ideas and wishes for functions you'd like to see in Help & Manual. Current version only please (H&M7).

Moderators: Alexander Halser, Tim Green

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Paul Catling
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Mar 15, 2016 11:50 am

H&M Plugin / Add-On

Unread post by Paul Catling »

Does H&M have the ability to add functionality like MS Visual Studio extensions or other products have plug-ins?
I have a particular function in mind for inserting or updating Topic Variables. We have an external tool which edits the topic.xml files adding the chosen set to the:
<topic-variables>
section. We especially use for example
<topic-variable id="DOC_GUID">abe59119-7e4c-4ad4-a8fc-93df4fd765af</topic-variable>
as we import the published help into a Drupal Web site and use the GUID as an id so topic title or other name changes do not create duplicates.

We would like to include this mass update and guid generation "inside" H&M for convenience and improved workflow.

I suspect there may be other users that have the skills to make plug-in functionality for other purposes and may want to share the tools?

All the Best,
Paul.
Flynet Limited
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Tim Green
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Re: H&M Plugin / Add-On

Unread post by Tim Green »

Hi Paul,

Help+Manual doesn't currently have support for plugins, but that's an interesting idea. I'm passing it on to the development team for special consideration. However, please understand that something like this is quite deep-level, so it's unlikely to be added as a dot update within the current version. This is the type of function that would be implemented in a major new release, which is when we make structural changes.

All this being said, the uncompressed XML format does make this a little moot, because it allows you to grep and manipulate the source of your projects in any way you like. The benefit of adding the functionality as a plugin would basically be streamlining. 8)
Regards,
Tim (EC Software Documentation & User Support)

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Paul Catling
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Mar 15, 2016 11:50 am

Re: H&M Plugin / Add-On

Unread post by Paul Catling »

Tim,

Many Thanks for that. Yes I agree and understand it would be a major addition and so not a patch etc.

In this case, yes it would be streamlining but nice :-) We have a tool that does what we want but I don;t want to do it! ;-) I want our documentation person (will soon be many persons - more H&M licenses...) to do this. We expect to have many 100s of projects within a year and I just updated 309 topics in just the first few updates...

I suspect there may be more uses for H&M plug-ins if the feature was there. I notice some strange spelling check requests for instance.

We look forward to seeing what may happen with this and keep up the good work. With or without this plug-in, we are moving forward with H&M for all out help (PDF/CHM/Web).

All the Best,
Paul.
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