Work­ing with Mind­Touch tem­plates can vary for dif­fer­ent ver­sions of Mind­Touch, so it is impor­tant to know which ver­sion you are using. Mind­Touch Respon­sive is the lat­est, and you can eas­i­ly detect it by chang­ing the width of your brows­er win­dow. If the user inter­face changes, you are using Mind­Touch Respon­sive. If not, you are using one of the ear­li­er versions.

Check detailed instruc­tions on how to detect what Mind­Touch ver­sion you are using.

Lightspeed framework

With­in Mind­Touch, con­tent is orga­nized in what is known as Light­speed frame­work. This frame­work allows con­tent cre­ators to quick­ly find and reclas­si­fy con­tent with a sin­gle click.

There are three con­tent types in the Light­speed framework:

• Cat­e­gories – The high­est lev­el of con­tent under the Light­speed framework.
• Guides – A cat­e­go­ry’s sub­sec­tion used for orga­niz­ing content.
• Arti­cles – The knowl­edge con­tent orga­nized in tabs and dis­played in guides.

Mind­Touch site struc­ture can be com­pared with a “knowl­edge tree”. The the trunk acts as the top of the hier­ar­chy, branch­es as cat­e­gories and guides, and leaves as articles.

Cat­e­gories can be either a prod­uct or a per­sona. Cre­at­ing a cat­e­go­ry is the first step of build­ing your Mind­Touch site.

Under a cat­e­go­ry, you can cre­ate dif­fer­ent guides to tar­get a spe­cif­ic audi­ence or fea­ture set. Final­ly, with­in a spe­cif­ic guide, you can orga­nize indi­vid­ual articles.

It is also pos­si­ble to have cat­e­gories with­in cat­e­gories and guides with­in guides.

MindTouch Template Types

To ensure cre­ation of struc­tured and orga­nized doc­u­men­ta­tion, a Mind­Touch site con­sists of var­i­ous tem­plate types. Every type serves a dis­tinct pur­pose and assists your users in find­ing infor­ma­tion quick­ly and effectively.

Mind­Touch stores all tem­plates in the library of tem­plates. There are pre­de­fined tem­plates you can use, or you can build your own, cus­tom templates.

Site struc­ture plays an imper­a­tive role for both — user expe­ri­ence and SEO.

Pre­de­fined tem­plates are found with­in the /Template:MindTouch fold­er, and are updat­ed every week, which means any changes made will poten­tial­ly be overwritten.

In order to cre­ate a dif­fer­ent theme for your Mind­Touch site, you’d need to cre­ate cus­tom page templates.

When cre­at­ing cus­tom tem­plates, best prac­tice is to first cre­ate a top lev­el, named /Template:YourCompany, and to store all cus­tom tem­plates under this par­ent template.

Functional MindTouch templates

Func­tion­al tem­plates are nec­es­sary for the sys­tem to func­tion cor­rect­ly. Mind­Touch con­trols all Func­tion­al tem­plates, so you can­not cus­tomize or mod­i­fy any of them, with­out the risk of those changes being overwritten.

New Page Templates

After you build cat­e­gories and guides, you will have to fill them with arti­cles. This is when you will use New page templates.

Page tem­plates allow dif­fer­ent authors to cre­ate new arti­cles in a con­sis­tent, stan­dard­ized way. Admin­is­tra­tors can con­trol spe­cif­ic tem­plates and lever­age access to con­tent creators.

New page tem­plates appear in the New Page gallery, when cre­at­ing pages. You can choose to use some of the pre­de­fined lay­outs like How-to-Page, Knowl­edge-Base-page, and Ref­er­ence-Page, or you can cre­ate cus­tom templates.

One of the pri­ma­ry uses of cus­tom page tem­plates is for Mind­Touch brand­ing. If you wish to cus­tomize Mind­Touch to achieve a brand­ed look in your pages – for exam­ple to per­son­al­ize the lay­out of an FAQ page, prod­uct guides or API doc­u­men­ta­tion – you can use a cus­tom-cre­at­ed page template.

 pur­plenote:A brand’s strength is built upon its deter­mi­na­tion to pro­mote its own dis­tinc­tive val­ues and mission.
~ Pro­fes­sor Jean-Noel Kapfer­er, (Re)Inventing the Brand

Content Templates

Con­tent tem­plates are con­tent con­tain­ers. Their pri­ma­ry usage is to insert fre­quent­ly used infor­ma­tion or styles into the body of oth­er pages. You will use con­tent tem­plates in two dif­fer­ent situations:

• When you want to avoid retyp­ing an often-used piece of information
• When you want to make sure all con­tent cre­ators use the same for­mat­ting and do not lose time on styling for­mat­ted notes

Con­tent tem­plates are avail­able on the Edi­tor toolbar.

Branding Templates

Brand­ing tem­plates allow you to style the look of your Mind­Touch sup­port site. They tar­get dif­fer­ent sec­tions of the theme:

• F1 Prepend & Append
• Login Page
• Site Head­er & Footer
• PDF Head­er & Footer

Using Brand­ing tem­plates, you can imple­ment your logo and basic cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty. If you want to cus­tomize Mind­Touch, more than tem­plates can offer, you can uti­lize our cus­tom Mind­Touch brand­ing ser­vices.

Custom MindTouch Templates by purpleplanet

pur­ple­plan­et has exten­sive expe­ri­ence in work­ing with Mind­Touch tem­plates and advanced Mind­Touch brand­ing. Whether you are look­ing for stan­dard brand­ing using only pre­de­fined tem­plates, or pre­mi­um brand­ing with CSS styling and cus­tom tem­plates, we can help you!

In the past few years, we have suc­cess­ful­ly brand­ed numer­ous Mind­Touch sites, includ­ing those for such For­tune 500 com­pa­nies as Zen­e­fits, Juniper Net­works, Yodlee and Avalara. pur­ple­plan­et enabled these clients to ben­e­fit from an enhanced sup­port por­tal expe­ri­ence for their customers.

You can check out more Mind­Touch brand­ing ref­er­ences on the pur­ple­plan­et port­fo­lio page.