The new 1.6 codebase has already been rolled-out with great success on a number of servers.
There have been many changes “under the hood” since the last 1.4 release; our programmers have been busy adding speed and ease-of-use enhancements as well as major new features such as workflow and discussion boards – All this with a simple backwards-compatible upgrade path that minimises disruption.
MKDoc is particularly known for ease of use, clear navigation and clarity of presentation for documents. To complement this, MKDoc-1.6 adds many new features that allow visitor interaction with the system – Following are just some of these features.
When this setting is enabled, users can sign-up for an account with an MKDoc site, the process is painless and involves a confirmation email for a username and password. Signing-up for an account opens-up access to extended MKDoc features.
Any area of an MKDoc site can now be marked as hidden, this allows the creation of sections that are only accessible to users with an editor account – Providing all the functionality of a private intranet system within the standard MKDoc framework.
Any MKDoc document can now have a fully threaded discussion board where signed-up users can post comments, questions and answers.
MKDoc discussion boards have a supervision system that utilises the standard IMAP internet protocol to moderate postings – Any IMAP client such as Microsoft Outlook can be used by editors to browse, delete or edit messages.
When enabled, this setting allows visitors who have signed-up as users to have their own homepage on the site – They can modify and create their own MKDoc documents in a special corner of your MKDoc site.
New to MKDoc-1.6 is the ability for editors to select from a list of audiences for any document. This list of audiences is customisable, but might include any categories of interest that visitors might have such as ‘education’, ‘law’, ‘cookery’ or even ‘software’.
In parallel with this, visitors can indicate their interests by setting options, allowing MKDoc to customise their user-experience whenever appropriate,
MKDoc can now be instructed to send out daily, weekly or monthly newsletters that contain links to new documents. Each user gets a custom newsletter tailored precisely to their interests.
Of course newletters are optional and don't get sent unless a user enables them in their preferences.
Editors can place ‘headlines’ components on any MKDoc document, ‘headlines’ are a list of new documents from any area of the site that match the visitors audience preferences and interests.
For example, the front page of an MKDoc site might consist of a series of links to the latest news headlines from the ‘news’ section of the site.
The experience of document creators and editors has been greatly enhanced with the new release of MKDoc. New and existing features are explained with handy inline help captions that ease the process for new and occasional editors.
With all the new features for editors, MKDoc is an ideal blogging or news tool; documents with attached discussion boards are easy to create, features like front-page headlines, newsletters and RSS newsfeeds bring visitors directly to the content that interests them.
MKDoc has always had the ability to export RSS newsfeeds to other sites and aggregators – This allows operators of other sites to embed your headlines into their pages.
MKDoc-1.6 now has this ability to import headlines from anywhere on the internet that provides an RSS feed; these can be news agencies, aggregators and of-course – other MKDoc sites.
MKDoc allows editors to create content at any level that they feel comfortable – Advanced users can type HTML directly and normal users can simply use plain text,
The plain-text component in MKDoc-1.6 has been overhauled, users can create bulleted lists, titles and emphasised text quickly and easily.
New features allow the creation of both simple and complex workflow arrangements.
The ability to have private areas or even just single hidden documents means that content can be prepared away from sight and released when ready; individual authors can be restricted from publishing, having their content subject to editorial control.
Documents can be copied to new locations and even components that exist within documents can be moved to other documents.
It has always been possible to customise the look and feel of HTML pages without compromising the accessibility for which MKDoc is renowned – MKDoc-1.6 contains a number of enhancements to ease the process for web-designers and create any design that they can imagine.
Cascading Style Sheets are the perfect way to customise HTML without getting involved in rearranging the HTML code itself. CSS stylesheets, logos and favicon files for MKDoc can now be uploaded via the standard web interface.
There are various new features that a designer can now make use-of to improve an MKDoc site:
Hyperlinked images in documents no longer involve editing templates, they can be simply and easily created by editors.
New sidebar-boxes can link to similar and related documents or contain a quick reference listing of all the links in the page.
Attached files can now automatically appear alongside a suitable image, for example, pdf documents can have an Acrobat icon.
Simple URLs for attachments; previously files attached to documents had a shortened URL, now they simply appear as attachments to their parent document with a human readable URL.
For some customisation jobs, CSS stylesheets are not sufficient to control the layout and precise arrangement of HTML pages. MKDoc now fully supports the TAL (tagged attribute language) specification for WYSIWYG templating.
