Popular Integrations with Fluid Topics to Enhance Your Content Workflow

Many organizations struggle with content scattered across multiple silos. This makes it difficult to deliver consistent and accessible information across all user touchpoints. At Fluid Topics, we help our customers break down content silos with out-of-the-box connectors that enable our Product Knowledge Platform (PKP) to aggregate and unify content from diverse sources. Whether it’s PDFs, Word documents, Markdown files, or structured content from a CCMS, all information is seamlessly brought together into a single, centralized hub. Once Fluid Topics aggregates the documentation, it easily and instantly delivers all content to any digital channel, including our ready-to-use, customizable documentation portal.

Our teams are always looking for new connector opportunities, and we work closely with our customers to meet their needs. Read on to learn more about Fluid Topics connectors, then discover our customers’ most valuable integrations.

What are Fluid Topics Connectors?

There are two types of connectors: those for our authoring tool partners and those for specific formats.

For our partner solutions, we work with their teams to create seamless publishing workflows. These integrations allow technical writers to publish directly to Fluid Topics from within their content creation environment, just by clicking a button. With these UI “add-ons”, the content source functions as a bridge to Fluid Topics, simplifying the publishing process and reducing manual effort.

For format connectors, content administrators can manually upload files directly to the Fluid Topics portal or use our APIs to publish content from certain sources. For example, a team writing in Markdown using Visual Studio Code can package their content and publish it to Fluid Topics through our Markdown connector. The connectors serve as an entry gate, processing and preparing the content for delivery within the platform.

These connectors provide real business value to customers. Teradata’s documentation was produced using six different tools, resulting in an inconsistent and siloed content experience for users. By centralizing their technical content on a single documentation portal powered by Fluid Topics, they streamlined access and delivery, turning their documentation portal into the company’s most visited site with over 5 million visits in a single year.

7 Integrations Our Customers Love

Read on to discover 7 of our customers’ favorite Fluid Topics connectors that integrate our PKP with the content operations tools they know and love.

1. Component Content Management Systems

While the goal of this article was to highlight less obvious integrations, we can’t talk about our customers’ favorite solutions to connect to Fluid Topics without starting with Paligo, Author-it, Heretto and other popular Component Content Management Systems (CCMSs). Content creation and delivery are both core parts of documentation management, so, together, CCMSs and Fluid Topics are essential foundations for smooth content operations.

CCMSs are built for structured content authoring, where technical writers typically work in markup languages such as DITA, DocBook, or S1000D. Fluid Topics’ dedicated solutions connectors seamlessly harmonize content from your CCMS along with any other documentation (for example, from Word) at the touch of a button.

For example, using the Paligo connector, Human Resources Management Software provider, Darwinbox reworked their content production and content delivery.

Similarly, for Hexagon, Fluid Topics’ native integration with Author-it, meant that their documentation team could self-publish technical content as often as required, directly from the Author-it UI and in a fully automated process. They didn’t need additional IT work or support once the integration was completed.

2. Unstructured Documents

Most office, design, presentation, and e-learning tools produce unstructured files (i.e., .pdf, .rtf, .txt, .html, .ods, .odt, .odp, .xls, .ppt, .xmp). This is not a limitation for Fluid Topics. To bridge the gap, we provide an Unstructured Documents connector. It lets teams enrich these raw files with metadata and structure, making them ready for seamless publishing to their Fluid Topics portal.

Microsoft Word

Word documents are a prime example of unstructured content. Even with a surge of new authoring tools, Word remains a go-to, especially for tech writing teams. Its commenting and track changes features keep it ahead for collaborative drafting.

Fluid Topics’ Microsoft Word connector transforms .docx files into structured, topic-based content. It not only breaks down documents into reusable components but also extracts embedded metadata, enriching your content before publishing it to your knowledge repository.

3. OpenAPI

The OpenAPI Specification has become a global standard for defining and building RESTful APIs. Developers everywhere rely on it to power open-source tools and frameworks. With Fluid Topics, customers can easily connect their OpenAPI documentation by publishing it in YAML or JSON formats then plugging it into their Fluid Topics content hub using the dedicated format connectors.

When we talked to HPS, a global provider of payment solutions and a Fluid Topics customer, they shared how they kicked off by publishing their DITA content from Componize with Fluid Topics, then quickly moved on to their developer docs. Pierre-Olivier Saint-Joanis, HPS Quality Manager, revealed their game plan: “[We] are working in parallel on a Swagger (now OpenAPI) doc for our JSON APIs. At first, we opened the portal to our 300 internal engineers. The success was immediate, because of how easy it becomes to target the right information in a large corpus. The feedback from these users is excellent.”

4. MkDocs

MkDocs is a simple and quick static site generator where documentation teams can prepare source files in Markdown, store them in a documentation directory, and manage them with a single YAML configuration file. This platform is a popular, free resource for teams looking to implement a docs-as-code workflow. Customers can easily connect an MkDocs document to Fluid Topics.

Moreover, by combining their Markdown files with dynamic content delivery, companies achieve efficient documentation production and continuous integration. Watch our webinar, “Tech Doc and Continuous Integration: Wielding the Markdown Secret Weapon” to discover how your existing Markdown content can enrich your technical documentation.

5. GitHub and GitLab

GitLab and GitHub are two popular version control platforms that help teams collaborate and manage code changes. Developers working in GitHub often rely on GitHub Actions, a powerful feature that automates key parts of the software development lifecycle, such as code reviews, branch management, and issue triage, all integrated with CI/CD pipelines. This type of content is highly valuable.

Teams can leverage our Markdown and OpenAPI connectors to obtain GitHub and GitLab content. Combining this with our FT Publishing tool, they can also automate the extraction of any markdown content updates.

6. Jira

Jira is a popular issue tracking system that many companies use for tracking technical support issues and bugs or for planning their roadmap and development. This system holds a vast wealth of information, and using APIs, they can publish release notes directly from Jira to their Fluid Topics documentation portal.

Fluid Topics integrates with Jira using custom bots and dedicated text fields that link each task to a specific release version. When teams trigger the bot to access Jira’s Release Management System, it extracts any task tagged with the latest product version number. The bot gathers, harmonizes, and arranges all ticket information into a preset Release Note template before publishing the note to the company’s internal portal for proofreading. Following any updates, the bot owner can deliver the final release note to their public documentation portal in a single click.

Fabrice Lacroix, CEO of Fluid Topics, and Gaspard Bébié-Valérian, certified technical writer and functional consultant, explore this documentation automation in the webinar “Scaling Content Operations with Docs as Code and Robots”.

7. Confluence

Many companies use this web-based corporate wiki every day to host their internal documentation. It’s a gold mine for information around collaborative projects, products, and knowledge from across teams.

With our Confluence connector, our customers transform their Confluence spaces into structured documents and render them centrally accessible in their Fluid Topics content repositories. During this transformation, each Confluence space becomes a document, and each page within a space becomes a topic.

This seamless tool integration was a key selling point for Darwinbox. Sagar Garuda explained how connectors like this helped his team develop interactive, personalized, and scalable content experiences for their users. “By connecting Paligo, Confluence, and Fluid Topics, we’ve accelerated content publishing without sacrificing quality or accuracy.” By standardizing the content structure and presentation, our connectors make content operations seamless from start to finish.

Developing Custom Connectors

We have several other connectors that weren’t mentioned, but that you can find here. Beyond the existing connectors, we work closely with our customers to provide a smooth content delivery process. This partnership includes addressing unique, custom connection needs that are not natively part of Fluid Topics’ connector package. Therefore, we offer APIs for custom integrations with external, third-party apps and a Python library for customers to develop their own custom connectors for more niche content source needs.

Conclusion

Our customers know that working with Fluid Topics means a surefire way to connect their content from across sources, harmonize all formats, and centralize it into a unified knowledge repository. Creating a seamless content experience provides true value by helping internal and external users find product information quickly and easily, driving sales, reducing support costs, and optimizing team efficiency.