Wiki resources linking to PDFs or pages?
Looking for some advice or how-to. We're still pretty new to Igloo. We set up a Wiki for a resources page, because we like the navigate-by-alphabet. However, many of the resources we want to surface that way are PDFs or other pages. Right now, we end up with wiki articles that just provide a hyperlink to where people really want to go. I don't love the extra click and the wiki format sort of buries the link unless I remind everyone to apply a different style to the link.
I found this post about using redirects --https://customercare.igloosoftware.com/community/community_discussions/wiki_redirects which is brilliant but may not be the right solution for what we're attempting. It's difficult to edit the article afterwards, and you have to know how to put in the javascript, which some of our people won't be comfortable doing.
Anyone have other solutions? Are we just going down the wrong path to use a Wiki for this -- would we be better with using Links and either manually alphabetizing or coming up with some other way to organize?
Thanks!
7 Replies
I would use a links widget and organize the links yourself. It's easy to drag and drop to rearrange and you can use link groups to put into sections. I typically use a wiki for native content to the site. I've only used the redirect when I link something wrong in a communication :)
After you upload a PDF to your files section, use the embed option to embed it directly into the Wiki article if you aren't already doing that.
Thank you Molly Sproatt and Dori Gray -- both good suggestions! Didn't know about embedding the PDF, so I'll give that go for sure.
We have been going through the same conversations with our DW content managers. I think you have to determine if you want your support documentation to be a Wiki with on-page content or a PDF that is edited elsewhere and just housed on your site. Choosing the wiki route requires you to "recreate" the content in the PDF on your wiki page. This will help eliminate the "extra click" and also make your content easier to search. Now, while you can attach the PDFs to your wiki articles, do note that those attachment files do not adhere to the same versioning features as files placed in a folder channel. This caused us to decide that short-term documents that age out quickly can be attached but anything that will live on in our platform must be in a folder channel to utilize versioning. If you choose to stick with using your original PDFs, then you can use Molly's suggestion of creating links or CTAs that point to the respective PDFs/Folders. This is definitely a time saver but also introduces multiple clicks to surface this same information.
We have created a workaround for this, same as Dori mentioned above. Added a request for this functionality but it hasn't been 'voted up' for addition to the platform's functionality.
Very simple process, easy to explain for users but not intuitive in any fashion so always an obstacle in training.
But fortunately if the document is updated, it also updates it in the page which is a big win.
I second Lupe's suggestion. Try to make as many of those PDFs into wiki articles for a better user experience since PDFs aren't friendly for web consumption. Our company culture is big on PDFs and as the manager of our intranet, I've had to push hard on our content managers to turn many of their PDFs into content on the page. It's also easier for them to manage. It might take a while to get their, but it's worth it in the end.
John Vasquez this is definitely a more ideal path for UX.