Create and Publish Content for Your Enablement Site

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the enablement site publishing cycle.
  
• Explain what writers can do with Trailmaker Content to format modules and trails.
  
• Explain what release managers can do with Trailmaker Release to organize and manage content.
  

Enablement Site Content Lifecycle

Creating and publishing content for an enablement site involves multiple roles that collaborate to plan, write, review, publish, and localize the content. 

Plan Your Content (1)

The first step to create awesome content is making a plan! Content on the Trailhead platform is organized into trails, modules, and units with quizzes. That’s a lot of content to create, and a blank page can be daunting. To help you get started, we recommend that your content creators spend some time developing a strategy and an outline for the content that you want to publish. 

Romina, a content creator at Pure Aloe who specializes in enablement strategy, plans a trail that includes multiple modules. She develops an outline that identifies the learning objectives she wants to achieve and maps those objectives to the modules that she wants to create.

Draft Your Content (2)

Cindy, a content creator who specializes in writing, uses Romina’s outline to begin drafting the content of each module. For now, Cindy works outside of Trailmaker, and drafts content in a word processor, such as Google Docs™, which makes it easy to write, edit, review, and resolve comments. She collaborates with Romina to make sure that her draft satisfies Romina’s identified learning objectives, and she collaborates with subject matter experts to confirm the accuracy and completeness of each unit, including quiz questions.

To learn more about developing a content strategy and drafting your content, check out the Writing for an Enablement Site module.

Convert Content in Trailmaker (3)

When the drafts are final, Cindy uses Trailmaker Content to set up the trails, modules, and units that she wants to publish. Each layer of content has its own requirements and metadata, such as a title, description, and filter categories.

In each unit, Cindy can copy and paste content from her draft, and then use the Trailmaker Content toolbar to format text, add tables, and embed images and videos. 

Cindy also creates the multiple-choice quiz for each unit. Again, she can easily copy and paste from her draft. 

Preview Modules

As she’s working on her modules and their units, Cindy can preview how the content will look when it’s eventually published. This way, she can make sure that her formatting and media are imported correctly, and she can make sure that she’s set up her  quizzes correctly. 

This preview is limited to only the module and units that Cindy is currently editing in her Trailmaker Content workspace. Optionally, Cindy can also share the preview URL with her collaborators and invite more feedback on her content. To learn more about previewing in Trailmaker Content, check out the Trailmaker Content Basics module.

Organize Content in a Trail

Next, Cindy can set up the trail, which puts all the modules in an easy sequence for learners to follow. Modules can also stand alone, outside of a trail.

Trailmaker Content doesn’t support preview for a trail.

Create Badge Art

After Cindy’s content is published, learners at Pure Aloe can start reading it, taking the quizzes, and earning points and badges. Depending on which authentication provider your enablement site uses, earned badges can appear on a learner’s profile page. So, Cindy needs badge art for her modules. She collaborates with a graphic designer to create a badge for each new module.

Create a Release (4)

While Cindy is busy converting her content in Trailmaker Content, the Pure Aloe release manager, Marisol, uses Trailmaker Release to create the release. She’s planning a quarterly update with content for all Pure Aloe employees. She creates a release that contains a list of all the modules and trails to update. To associate the actual content with a release, Cindy and Marisol complete these steps.

1. Cindy downloads a ZIP file一known as a backpack一that contains the source for a trail or module.
   
2. Cindy stores a copy of the backpack in a version control system.
   
3. Marisol gets the backpack from the version control system, and imports the backpack into her workspace in Trailmaker Content.
   
4. Marisol adds the trail or module to the release for a particular content collection.
   

Recall from the previous unit that a content collection contains all the trails and modules that you want to make available for a certain audience. Because Marisol is planning this update for all Pure Aloe employees, she selects the All Employees content collection.

Then, the planned release becomes available in Trailmaker Release.

Preview the Release (5)

Earlier, we saw that Cindy could preview a module and its units when she’s editing the content in Trailmaker Content. After the module is added to a release, Marisol and Cindy can preview the content again—this time in the context of all content that’s already published in the content collection on the Pure Aloe enablement site. This full release preview is restricted to users with the appropriate permissions, but provides another opportunity for content creators and stakeholders to validate content before publication. If any reviewers find something to correct before release, Cindy works with Marisol to fix the content, add the updated content to the release, and then reverify the content in preview.

Check Release Health

The content that you develop and refine in a word processor becomes a web page that learners see in a browser. Web pages can have many dependencies, including image files, references to other pages, accessibility attributes such as alternate text for images, and more. To help ensure that your learners have a smooth experience, Trailmaker Release can check for some common issues before you publish your content. For example, Trailmaker Release can check whether:

• A release is missing a module
  
• A module is missing a unit
  
• A module is missing its badge art
  
• An image file is the wrong type
  
• An image file is too large
  

At Pure Aloe, the release manager, Marisol, keeps an eye on the status of the release. If any issues appear, Marisol can collaborate with her writer, Cindy, to make corrections in Trailmaker Content.

Publish Content (6)

When the content creator confirms that the content is ready, and the release manager confirms that the release is healthy, the release is ready to be published. From Trailmaker Content, Marisol clicks Publish, and the content is live on the Pure Aloe enablement site. 

Localize Content (7)

English is the default language for all parts of an enablement site. By default, Trailmaker Content encodes all content as English. When a release manager publishes content, they publish content in English. But content creators can work with a localization team or vendor to translate your English content into any of these languages that an enablement site supports:

• French
  
• German
  
• Italian
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Portuguese (Brazil)
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Spanish (LATAM)
  
• Spanish (Spain)
  

To learn more, check out the Localize Trails and Modules unit of the Trailmaker Content Basics module.

Maintain or Archive Content (8)

Most enablement content isn’t evergreen. A company’s tools, processes, requirements, and strategy often change over time. Content creators can edit trails and modules that are already published. They can add or remove units in a module, and they can add or remove units in a trail. Content creators collaborate with a release manager to publish updates in a new release. To learn more, check out the Maintain Enablement Site Content Over Time unit of the Trailmaker Content Basics module.

Sometimes, content is no longer relevant, and doesn’t need to be available for learners to potentially access. In this case, your company can archive content so that it’s hidden from learners. Archiving doesn’t actually delete the content, and you can later restore content that’s been archived if you want to make that content available again. To learn more, check out the Trailmaker Release Basics module.

Pure Aloe is well on its way to providing learners with an engaging and personalized experience. The content plan is established, the enablement team has gained experience, and learners are earning points and badges. To learn more about how to configure and customize an enablement site for your company’s unique learning requirements, check out the next module, Enablement Site Configuration.

Resources

• Trailhead: Trailmaker Content Basics
• Trailhead: Trailmaker Release Basics
• Salesforce Help: Create Content with the Trailmaker Content app
• Salesforce Help: Manage Releases in the Trailmaker Release app
• Salesforce Help: Guidelines for Badge and Trail Art