[FM Discuss] generating online help

[mick fuzz]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 8:16 PM, politube <admin at politube.org> wrote:
> Hi,

hi kuros

>     * create context sensitive help (e.g. on a particular page of the
>       site user clicks help and the help for that page opens in a pop-up).
>     * the software for the help files is maintained on someone else's
>       service. I don't want to maintain a CMS/Wiki just for this purpose.

this is where flossmanuals should be able to help. I'm imagining that
your website systems is open source. If so then you can use
flossmanuals to create help on how to use your website and use the
excellent flossmanuals system.

>     * the service should be minimally customizable to support the L&F of
>       the site.
>     * searching/indexing ought be supported

flossmanuals can create skins

for example compare

http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Firefox/FireFtp
and
http://en.flossmanuals.net/bin/view/Firefox/FireFtp?skin=suitcase
and you can see that you can create your own look and feel - you just
have to sweet talk adam and send him a suitable css file do to that.




>     * As a last nice-to-have feature, users would be able to update the
>       help files.

that's the beauty of wiki style manuals :)


>  Really, I think that this a job for a single CMS serving several
>  websites, not only containing help, but perhaps about pages, terms of
>  use etc. (which really classify as help, right?).

i don't really understand you here. but i think that if it is an open
source publishing system that you are creating help for, then the help
files you create will be useful to other systems, is that what you are
saying?

>  As a minimal solution, perhaps I could use floss manuals to compose the
>  help, then click a button to generate/export HTML, which I tweak to
>  support my L&F. Is this a possibility? I sure miss the searching
>  capability on this though?

you could do this - but let's see if it is possible to create a skin for you -

also let's get you a log in so you can create a 'manual' for politube,
and start creating content.

Mick