How to Use Single Sourcing
ProProfs Knowledge Base is packed with powerful features which make your documentation experience a breeze.
Single Sourcing: Single Sourcing allows you to source a piece of content across different places in your documentation. ProProfs Knowledge Base offers multiple methods to use the same piece of content at different places in your documentation so that you don't need to write it again and again.
ProProfs Knowledge Base allows you to use Single Sourcing in 4 different ways:
1. Sync Page
Sync Page allows you to make the same page appear at multiple locations in your documentation. So, suppose you have an article that is relevant to three folders. You can create it in one folder and sync it at the two additional spots. All edits are centrally managed since its one page. Editing the page will automatically update all places it loads at.
2. Merge Tags
A merge tag is a small placeholder tag that may consist of a few words or strings of text, which you can add to any page on your help site. The text you add to the page is not formatted and is stored as plain-text on publishing the page. Merge tags are flexible and reusable, making it simple to make site-wide changes by editing the merge tag source instead of having to modify many pages, separately.
For example: You name a tag as "first name" and keep it's value as the first name of user. So, instead of manually typing each user's name, you can just add the "first name" tag and it will automatically fetch the user's first name.
You can apply many different branding styles to a single site. This saves you tons of time as you don’t have to manually recreate the content for each site. Simply add a new site and brand it as per your requirements.
Content Snippets are similar to Merge Tags, however, Merge Tags are used for small texts while Content Snippets are used for huge chunks of content which are media rich. This is a way to single-source a piece of content that you regularly use in different pages.
For example: You might have information such as copyrights, disclaimers, headers/footers, contact information or an image that is repeated in every help article. With single sourcing/content snippets you can create an article/topic once and then re-use the contents of this topic in other articles.
You can instantly update a number of things, such as the design of the page (header/footer), copyrights, or a piece of content on the page (text/images) by simply updating the content snippet.
Note* You can also create new knowledge bases by simply replicating your existing one. Any change you make on the new knowledge base will not affect your existing knowledge base in any way.