Inherited Settings: How to align and smartly change settings on your flipbooks.

Being efficient is an essential part of everyone's day-to-day job and iPaper advocates for better and more effective communication. We also provide a feature that can help you with this, but which function am I talking about?

I've always believed that software exists to make our lives easier and that's the way I like to think about iPaper. One of the features that many of our users don't know about is inherited settings. Sounds complicated, but it's actually not. Stick with me for a minute, and I will explain. 

Many of us like to brand our iPaper publications by using our logos, colors, preloaders and so on. Very often, we want these to be the same across all our content. So, what do we do? We edit each Flipbook separately to make sure these match. While this is easy to do for two Flipbooks, it can be cumbersome when you have many flipbooks.

And what happens if you change your logo two years down the road, or create a better version of your favicon? Well, you would have to go through all of these Flipbooks and edit each one of them to match the new setting. Nobody has time for that.

Wouldn't it be great to have a feature that allows you to apply settings to multiple Flipbooks simultaneously? Well, there is one; we call it Inherited settings and it's effortless to make use of.

Think about it this way: if you edit the settings of a folder, all Flipbooks in that folder will inherit them.

Here's an animated example of an altered setting on a folder illustrated with color:

In human language, this means that all Flipbooks will "borrow" the same settings as the folder they are placed in unless you specify different values.

It's pretty simple. 

1. Create a folder

2. Add all the Flipbooks you want in the folder

3. Go to Settings on your folder (Right click -> choose Settings)

4. Edit everything you want under "General," "Design," "Modules" and "Integration." Remember, everything you edit here will be applied to all the Flipbooks in the folder.

Let's say you want to brand a Flipbook with all your colors, but you maybe want a specific one to have a different logo. What do you do? The folder settings apply to a Flipbook unless you edit that Flipbook's settings. This means that if you modify the parameters of a Flipbook, these will overwrite the folder's settings.

To show you where inherited settings are possible and in use, we have added an icon next to each affected setting:

As seen here, an unbroken version of the chain-link icon signifies that the setting originates from an ancestor.

The broken chain link icon indicates a setting has been explicitly set.

In this GIF, I'm changing the preloader in the design settings of the folder "Ice Age" from a Logo to an animation.

I then view “Sid’s Flipbook”, to see that the change has been inherited.

Inherited settings help when you want to automate your work and make it more effective. Many of our users create folders with their preferred settings and, whenever they create a new Flipbook it automagically receives the correct settings 🧙‍♂️

It only takes a few seconds, and this is the smart way of working with iPaper. Once your publication is in the folder, all the company's branding applies to it, making it easier to recognize for the readers.