Fluid Topics

Fluid Topics is a content delivery platform that turns technical documentation into personalised, searchable digital experiences.

How to use Fluid Topics

1. Upload your source files (DITA, Markdown, HTML, PDF, or mixed formats) through the web console.
2. Let the indexing engine process content; tags, headings, tables, and graphics are detected automatically.
3. Organise collections by audience, product line, or release with the drag-and-drop workspace.
4. Publish to a live portal or embed individual topics in your support site using the widget generator.
5. Track traffic, search terms, and reading paths from the built-in analytics dashboard.

What I found during hands-on time with Fluid Topics

Advantages

• Powerful search: Typing just two or three characters surfaced relevant topics almost instantly, even in a 25,000-page knowledge base.
• Personalised views: Readers can switch between web, tablet, and mobile layouts, while role-based filters hide confidential engineering notes from customers.
• Granular publishing: I could expose one paragraph through an embedded snippet without revealing the entire manual, which kept the public site tidy.
• Version handling: Side-by-side comparison made it clear which features changed between firmware 1.2 and 1.3, saving our support team a huge amount of back-and-forth.
• No-code widgets: Marketing colleagues added curated reading lists to their campaign pages without asking for developer time.

Drawbacks

• Steep first week: The concept of maps, branches, and variants confused newcomers who expected a basic CMS.
• Limited out-of-box connectors: Zendesk and Salesforce are covered, yet linking to lesser-known ticketing tools required custom scripting.
• Price tiers: Charges rise sharply once the document count passes 50,000, so archival policies need planning.
• Batch upload speed: A 1 GB PDF batch took twenty minutes to complete, slowing overnight builds.

Closing thoughts

After several sprints spent shifting our legacy manuals into Fluid Topics, I’m convinced the platform rewards teams that invest a little time upfront. Once the taxonomy and permission rules were dialled in, readers found answers quicker and support call volume dropped. A bigger connector catalogue and faster bulk import would round out the package, yet the core experience already makes technical content feel fresh and easy to navigate.