purpleblog

Grab a coffee and read our purpleblog

Tea works too. Or hot choco­late. Or even some­thing stronger! Our arti­cles are based on the most com­mon ques­tions we get from our clients, that’s why they are so inter­est­ing to read, and actu­al­ly utilise. You won’t notice how time flies!

3 min read MindTouch Templates Tips

How To Get The Best Out Of MindTouch Templates

Key Takeaways

  • Visit the MindTouch library to make use of a range of pre-made templates or create custom ones. If you create your own, make sure to create a top-level first.
  • Content templates will make content production much more efficient as they ensure your preferred formatting is used across all web pages.
  • Use branding templates to implement your brand’s personality and its official logos and colours throughout your site.

The pri­ma­ry task of Mind­Touch tem­plates is to help you orga­nize your doc­u­men­ta­tion, to stan­dard­ize its appear­ance and sim­pli­fy the pub­lish­ing process. In this arti­cle, you will learn how to struc­ture and orga­nize con­tent, using Mind­Touch tem­plates, to improve nav­i­ga­tion and enhance user experience.

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.

Free Consultation
Please let us know your project requirements, and we’ll get in touch as soon as we can.

    We are pleased to welcome you on the purpleplanet!
    To order the service package you’ve chosen, please fill in the form and we’ll get in touch with you soon.

      We are pleased to welcome you on the purpleplanet!
      To order the service package you’ve chosen, please fill in the form and we’ll get in touch with you soon.