Some Changes Coming to ScreenSteps Live: Topics > Manuals
We wanted to notify all of our users of a few changes that are coming to ScreenSteps Live. These changes will primarily affect paid account holders.
This weekend we will be changing the name of “Topics” to “Manuals”. Some of our users were confused about what Topics really were and how they should organize their content. We think that a simple rename will make this much clearer. Don’t worry if you have sent urls out that look like http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/topics/1. Those will redirect tohttp://bmls.screenstepslive.com/manuals/1 after the update so none of your links will be broken.
In addition, we are changing the look a little bit for the new “Manuals”. You can now add a message to the left of each manual where you can include links to your mains site or other relevant information. We plan to add some additional options to this “Manuals Sidebar” in the near future, so stay tuned.
We have also added two new options, “Require Login for All Users” and “Permalinks for Manuals”.
Require Login for All Users
After the update there will be a new setting in your Accounts tab called “Require Login for All Users”. Checking this will mean that to view any lesson on your site a user must have a Reader account and be logged in. If you don’t check this box then everything will work as it does now. But, for those of you who don’t want the general public to see your lessons, this will add a simple way of acheiving that. Once a reader has logged in they will be able to see:
All of the lessons you have marked as public
All manuals you have marked as public
Any manuals you have specifically given them access to
Permalinks for Manuals
This is already available but you may not be aware of it. You can now add a permalink for a Manual. A permalink means that you can change your url for your manual from:http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/manuals/22
to
http://bmls.screenstepslive.com/manuals/TheNameOfMyProduct
Why does this matter? Updates. When you create a new topic it gets a new id which is that “22″ number in the first example. With permalnks you instantly point all incoming links to a new manual just by giving that manual the permalink name.
We have already been using this and it is very handy. We recently released an update to ScreenSteps that required us to update a lot of lessons. We created the Manual for the update but kept it hidden. Once the update was released we just changed the permalink and instantly, links that went to the previous manual were now pointing to the current manual. Try it out. It will make your life much easier.
Please let us know if you have any questions and we hope that you continue to enjoy using ScreenSteps and ScreenSteps Live.
