What it Does Best and Lack

Tasks where you should find Tópico useful

• Organize topics into a tree structure;
• Create links to other topics in the collection;
• Create and apply custom semantic markup;
• Centrally manage the publication process;
• Transform the whole collection into the target publication;
• Create the menu tree, site map, breadcrumbs, custom scripts, and more;
• Add links to sub pages and related topics during the publication process;
• Insert reused and generated content during the publication process;
• Integrate other XML document in your XHTML publication.

Tasks where Tópico won't help you much

• Setup an environement for multiple authors/contributors;
• Create a scalable content management system;
• Work on the global design of your web site;
• Create engaging interactive pages;
• Add multimedia objects;
• Create image maps;
• Create web forms;
• Edit scripts.

In some circumstances, upgrading existing collections to take advantage of newer features might require manual work on your part.

While it can be used to create nice web sites, Tópico is neither a layout program nor a general purpose HTML/XHTML/XML editor. You will need an appropriate dedicated XML/HTML/CSS/JavaScript editor to get the most out of your publishing workflow.

There are many specialized editors you can use for all these tasks but not many of those will supply you with the functionalities Tópico provides, which is bringing all those separate files together in a cohesive publication. Checkout these highly suggested free companion tools.

Quickly revisiting some of the above limitations:

• Working on a page layout for a publication is done at the template level, in this case the XSLT editor. Semantic XHTML markup (at which Tópico will help), along with CSS takes care of the content level styling.
• Adding multimedia objects can be done by referencing them in another file you can edit with your favorite editor. Multimedia objects can also be included directly in the editor (in the XML view) but they will be displayed as placeholders in WYSIWYG mode.
• Creating image maps is best done in an image editor. The resulting markup would typically be used in the publication template but could also be referenced just like other XML content.
• Creating web forms can be done in your preferred HTML editor. If you give an ID attribute to the form, you'll be able to include the form element in any of your topic.

This way, you can use the best tool for a task and bring together all these individual files in Tópico for publishing your XHTML topic collections.