CMS-like help framework for web applications?

Question

We have a relatively large web application (>200 pages) to which we need to begin adding help screens. We were wondering if there is a CMS-like application that is particularly well suited to such endeavors (rather than trying to build all the business owner editing screens, search, formatting, etc ourselves).

Any suggestions?

I see you tagged this with asp.net-mvc. Does this mean you want the CMS to be using the asp.net mvc framework? — John Farrell, Apr 25 '11 at 03:03
Do you also want to integrate these help pages with your app?? or will it be a standalone app? — sajoshi, Apr 25 '11 at 03:32
Our app is asp.net-mvc, the CMS does not need to be. Ideally we'd be able to integrate the help pages with our app, but if this isn't a typical feature we could just link to the relevant pages. — Beep beep, Apr 25 '11 at 05:58

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 30 '11 at 02:51

8

The quickest and easiest way to do this is to take something like ScrewTurn Wiki which is ideal as a knowledge base and just create the help links to the help screens in your existing site.

http://www.screwturn.eu/

answered Apr 30 '11 at 02:51

IrishChieftain

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Actually, that's a really good idea! It looks like their website is made with ScrewTurn as well, and the formatting/navigation is pretty slick. – Beep beep May 01 '11 at 15:28
You probably don't want to waste your developer's time when it can be avoided. An intern could basically do this work ;-) – IrishChieftain May 01 '11 at 16:00
Exactly - that's why I've been asking around. I realize that developing a help system is conceptually easy, but by the time we add searching, custom formatting, easy editing (or word uploads), etc, it could become a 1-2 month time sink. Honestly, had I not realized that the ScrewTurn site itself was done in their own Wiki, I probably wouldn't have considered it ... their demos are not nearly as professional looking. – Beep beep May 02 '11 at 05:09
If you're going this route, don't forget to mark as answer :) – IrishChieftain May 02 '11 at 05:22
Don't worry, I'm just waiting until closer to the end to see if there's a better answer. Right now, this is the best. – Beep beep May 02 '11 at 23:44

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '11 at 11:04

If your app is already MVC, why not add in some contextual help to it...

For example, in your layout page, add an icon that simply takes the user to the help page, passing the referring page. The URL would be

If you were on

YourApp/Customer/Create/

Then

YourApp/Help/Customer/Create/

You could then have a HelpController that looks up help for the CustomerController, and specifically the Create action, which allows you to give very granular help as well as fall back to more general help if specific help isn't available.

You could even redirect to a CMS that contains the information if you don't want to write that part yourself, you would then just need to store the mapping to the CMS page that supplies help for the given topic (or use a similar convention-based route for the content).

Here is the routing rule for your Global.asax.cs file.

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Help",
            "Help/{controllerName}/{actionName}",
            new { controller = "Help", 
                  action = "Details", 
                  controllerName = UrlParameter.Optional, 
                  actionName = UrlParameter.Optional }
        );

We will definitely do this, regardless of the app we use to store the help. — Beep beep, Apr 29 '11 at 14:09

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited May 02 '11 at 23:44

3

Have you looked @ Orchard ? Its an MVC based CMS (like WordPress). I am thinking that you could install orchard to something like /Help in your application and create 'Posts' for each one of your help topics. By using the Clean URL features, it should be pretty easy to generate the appropriate links from your custom app. (~/Help/Module1 for instance). It also has search, roles, and probably most of the other things you would be looking for.

The only part I am not 100% on is styling, but from what I read, it looks to be pretty easy to do.

edited May 02 '11 at 23:44

Beep beep

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answered Apr 27 '11 at 19:49

Tommy

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Yes, we have looked at Orchard and other CMSs. These are our fallback plan if we cannot find something else ... although we'd love to find a pre-defined template rather than hack something together or pay a designer. So many sites have help systems that are pretty simple yet slick, I would have thought a product existed to facilitate the development of such a system. – Beep beep Apr 28 '11 at 04:46

CMS-like help framework for web applications?

3 Answers3