Product Documentation
Creating great product documentation has never been easier!
Simply create your documentation by creating folders and documents in Google Drive and let Ultradox create an online documentation that plays nicely on both desktop and mobile devices.
Check out the Product Documentation as an example: We are providing you with exactly the same app that we are using ourselves to generate our documentation.
Using Google Drive for writing creating your documentation has many advantages:
The navigation of your help site reflects the folder structure on Google Drive. Just add a folder on top level to support a new language or add a subfolder to add an item to the top level navigation.
Using Google Docs for creating the content makes collaboration a breeze - not only with your coworkers but also with your customers: Let them make suggestions to enhance the documentation right in Google Docs.
You can then harvest the changes and publish the new revision. It can be done in seconds without any technical expertise required.
A carefully selected set of layout elements will give your documentation a professional look and feel that has been carefully designed by analyzing dozens of state-of-the-art online help sites.
Based on the content of your documents a navigation menu will be added to quickly jump to sections of interest.
Get your free copy of the Product Documentation example.
Get started
Open the Ultradox Automation Product Documentation. The first building block contains a form where you can enter some details about the product.
Enter the name, logo and URL of your product and other settings like the primary color of the generated site.
You will find some more options described in the chapters below.
Generate the site
Once you have specified the settings click on the Run icon in the main toolbar or hit Run in the Run menu.
After starting the app your will be prompted to either generate all or only selected pages. When your documentation is growing you will learn to love the feature to generate only selected pages as it is much faster and will consume less credits of your license.
When generating the site you will see the actions being performed in the console.
When the generation is complete a dialog will open that allows you to open the last generated page in a new browser tab.
The generated site will look like this.
Creating content
The navigation of your help site will be generated from the folder structure in your Content folder and the contents of your documents:
On top level you will find A. en and B. de which you will contain the localized documentation for each language.
You will find these languages in the top level language picker.
In each language folder you will find the folders for the top level navigation.
The names of the folders will appear in the colored top navigation bar.
The folders below the top navigation will appear on the left side navigation of the documentation. You can either have folders or documents on this level.
The order of the menu items is based on the name of the folders and files. Please prepend letters or numbers followed by a space as shown in the example to create the desired order.
The navigation menu on the right is generated from the content of your documents.
All section titles formatted with Heading 3 will show up in the navigation menu on the right. If you do not have any section titles formatted with Heading 3 the navigation menu on the right will not show up and the content will take up the additional space.
Layout elements
We have carefully designed a set of elements that can be used in your documentation. Please stick to these elements in order to create a consistent look and feel.
The example app contains a page describing all layout elements like typography, videos, links, code samples, buttons and more.
For a list of all layout elements, check out the generated example site.
Configure footer
The site will be generated using an HTML template. You will find the template with the name Product Documentation Template in the example folder on your Google Drive.
When opening the template with Editey you can see the HTML code to generate the footer at the bottom of the page.
Just enter the desired info into the footer or feel free to delete the footer if you do not need it.
Full Text Search
If you want to make your help site searchable, configure a Google Custom Search Engine to index the generated site and copy the ID into the settings form.
Click on the Search engine ID button to get the ID of your search engine.
The URL that you want to index will be http://web.ultradox.com/<yourfileid> if you are using the default setting.
API reference
When generating your documentation you can of course leverage all Ultradox features.
As an example for generating content from structured data we have included an API reference into the example documentation that will be generated from an API definition.
If you are working on an app with a public API defined in Swagger 2.0 format, you can just paste the public URL of your swagger definition into this form.
When generating your documentation a nice API reference will be generated for you from your definition file.
If you do not need an API reference, feel free to remove the Reference folder.
Custom domain
By default the generated online help will be available at http://web.ultradox.com/<yourfileid>/
Depending on your Ultradox license you can publish the generated documentation right to your own custom domain. Just enter the configured custom domain name into the settings.
Make sure that your custom domain is configured properly by our experts before trying to publish to a custom domain.
Questions and Feedback
If you have any comments on this page, feel free to add suggestions right to the Google document that we are using to create this site.
If you are not yet member of the Ultradox community on Google+, please join now to get updates from our end or to provide feedback, bug reports or discuss with other users.
Last Updated: 12/20/18