MindTouch content management for documentation and self-service
August 24, 2017
MindTouch content management for documentation and self-service
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
MindTouch Responsive
Overall Satisfaction with MindTouch
We use Mindtouch to host our external/public facing documentation for our payment/financing product.
The audience for this documentation is a wide range of users: web developers, marketers, project managers, accountants, customer service managers, etc. We've set up an information architecture within Mindtouch to distinguish the content for these distinct audiences.
There are several departments at our company that contribute to our Mindtouch content: Integrations, Sales, Client Success, Operations, and Marketing. I manage the contributors from those groups, and have trained them on the best practices and usage of the Mindtouch product.
With Mindtouch's versioning/draft management, and ability to arbitrarily include entire page contents in other pages, we can have multiple contributors to content without worrying about content being lost or going stale. We can also gate/hide content, and make it available to only user groups, allowing us to deploy public documentation to beta-product users without allowing others to discover it or search for it.
The audience for this documentation is a wide range of users: web developers, marketers, project managers, accountants, customer service managers, etc. We've set up an information architecture within Mindtouch to distinguish the content for these distinct audiences.
There are several departments at our company that contribute to our Mindtouch content: Integrations, Sales, Client Success, Operations, and Marketing. I manage the contributors from those groups, and have trained them on the best practices and usage of the Mindtouch product.
With Mindtouch's versioning/draft management, and ability to arbitrarily include entire page contents in other pages, we can have multiple contributors to content without worrying about content being lost or going stale. We can also gate/hide content, and make it available to only user groups, allowing us to deploy public documentation to beta-product users without allowing others to discover it or search for it.
- Simple GUI editing (WYSIWYG) while still providing full customization (HTML/JS/CSS).
- Easy to use permissions and user roles schemes to control access to published content.
- Extensibility via customizable templates, API integrations, and other dekiscript widgets.
- Built-in versioning and draft system which allows for worry-free editing.
- Built-in site templates, scripts, and stylesheets cannot be overridden or removed. Our extensively customized instance of MindTouch could be significantly simplified, more performant, and easier to develop on without those hard coded includes. Having the ability to start with a 'clean-slate' or to individually exclude resources would facilitate further optimization.
- Permission/restriction settings can only be applied after the page has been saved. This makes it impossible to publish semi-private or private content without risking discovery.
- Help widget integrations are limited by default to ONE for our instance. We'd love to adopt this feature but are not clear on why it's deployment is so restricted.
- Need the ability to define arbitrary 'slugs' for pages, so they can be referenced via short names/URLs/paths. Currently content IDs are the only way to support this, and those have to be setup separately from the actual page authoring/editing screen. Not having this functionality also makes it extremely difficult to retire old content and redirect those page requests to some new content.
- Easier merchant integrations due to public availability/discoverability of documentation.
- Building positive brand/team image due to the availability of nice-looking and informative documentation.
- Faster iterations on and additions to documentation to support beta/new products.
We considered:
- Home-built solution
- Self-hosted solution using out-of-the-box libraries for API documentation
- Wordpress, Joomla, and other light-weight CMS/blog solutions for API and other documentation
- Knowledge bases built into existing/prospective customer service / ticketing systems: HelpScout, Desk.com, Freshdesk, etc.