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My MadWorld 2016 Content

Hey everybody,

The 2016 MadWorld Conference is now in the history books, and I’ve been asked to provide my content from my presentations here on my blog. I’ve created a page where you can view all the shared content from my presentations.

This year I was asked to participate in the Lightning Talk session. To be honest, I had a hard time narrowing down my topic until the last minute, so I didn’t have any slides prepared for that session. Instead, however, I’ve taken my topic–Using Browser Tools to Understand Your CSS–and I’ve turned it into a short YouTube video (you can see it at the end of the post).

I’ll write up a conference wrap-up post a bit later, but I wanted to get my slides and other content out there for you as soon as possible.

Here’s my lightning talk.

Madworld Preview – Extending MadCap Flare with Web Programming and Scripting

Madworld Preview – Extending MadCap Flare with Web Programming and Scripting

This is the second article in my MadWorld 2016 preview, where I tell you more about the content in my upcoming MadWorld 2016 presentations. In this post, I’m talking about my Tuesday (Apr 12) 1:30 PM presentation called “Extending MadCap Flare with Web Programming and Scripting.”

Often times I get questions from clients wanting to know if they can do something “extra” in their Flare projects. Once I had a client want to include a user-sortable table in the output. (The answer was jQuery.) I’ve had other clients who want to include a comments, or a customized contact link at the bottom of a topic with the ability to record user submissions.

In this presentation, I’ll show you how you can begin integrating jQuery, other javaScript, and even PHP content in your Flare project. We’ll show you where you can make changes and I’ll provide some code you can use to add some simple scripting features to your MadCap Flare projects.

I’m still working on this presentation, but at this point my working outline is as follows:

  • Introduction
  • Use case for web programming and scripting in Flare
  • Making changes to MasterPages
  • Using jQuery
    • Utilizing existing jQuery included in Flare
    • Adding custom jQuery libraries to your project
    • Sample project: end-user sortable tables
  • Using JavaScript
    • JavaScript sources
    • Internal vs. external javascript
    • Security considerations
    • Sample project: Useful Yes | No button with comments
  • Using PHP
    • Changing file extension
    • Editing PHP files in MadCap’s editor
    • Sample project: Star ratings of Flare topics (connected to database)