KnowledgebasePublisher – OSS FAQ management
The top-10 OSS packages (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, JBoss, etc) get all the glory; everyone knows about them and they deserve the limelight, no doubt. But it's the little guys who also do some really nice stuff and come to the rescue, too. Usually, I'm looking for something ultra-cool in open source land to talk about and it's not hard to find good topics, but sometimes the tasks you need to accomplish are simply rote. Take generating an FAQ, for example. Recently, I wanted to find a package that could do a reasonable job at managing the entries of an FAQ online. This problem lives right in that area where buying something to do the job just grates on my nerves, but hand-coding the HTML for an FAQ isn't exactly what I would call a good use of my time, and it's something that ought to "just be there"(TM). [BTW - I also have the theory that all vacuum cleaners should be free. After all, you're making the world a better place by vacuuming, so you should not have to add insult to good deed by having to buy a vacuum cleaner, right? Same with FAQs.] The first problem you hit when you want to find something like this is figuring out what to call it. If you search for "FAQ manager", "FAQ management", "FAQ maker", "FAQ Software" you get FAQ's on pointy-headed bad managers, good managers, and FAQs on anything that can make something, software-related FAQs, but it's tough to find software that's a manager of FAQs. If you think "it's just content" and start down the CMS search path, you'll get buried trying to find a CMS that is light enough to deal with the lowly FAQ. I found that this genre of software is generally found under the category of a knowledge base or knowledge management. After that honed down the search space, I was still left with many options which spanned the gambit from really crude Perl scripts, abandoned projects and sites, to full-blown knowledge management systems. I haven't evaluated them all, or even a minor percentage of them, but I did find a very nice package, KnowledgebasePublisher, actively developed, that does just what I want and wanted to draw your attention to it since it might work for you, too. First, it's a great fit for shared hosted web sites since most are running the prereqs. It's a PHP/MySQL package whose database is easily installable through phpMyAdmin, a web-based MySQL database manager most shared web-hosts support. You untar the package on your web site, upload the SQL schema through phpMyAdmin, run through a simple web-based install and configure page and it's running. I think it took maybe 10 minutes to get it up and running. After that, you can set up categories, articles, upload attachments to articles and do most of the standard FAQ things you'd expect. You can also tag articles with keywords and metadata descriptions which serves two purposes. One, KnowledgebasePublisher has a built-in search functionality so once into the FAQ page, you can search for specific items. Two, the metadata keywords and description will get generated into the meta tags of the HTML when the article is expanded. Your corporate search engines might appreciate that if they pay attention to metatags. Finally, you can easily integrate it into the look and feel of your site since it's template based. You create an HTML template and slap one simple {} macro into the body where you want it, point the system to use that template, and viola, your FAQ has an embedded look. It's also got CSS files you can use to modify the look and style of the FAQ itself. There are quite a few other nice features including automatically generating RSS feeds to articles in your knowledge base, email templates, feedback and comment options, but the core of easily managing an FAQ is in this package and it's not so bloated with features (like most CMSs) it makes sense to use it just for the FAQ portion of a basic web-sites. So the next time you need to make a humble FAQ, consider the yeoman, KnowledgebasePublisher.
A good knowledge management system is General Knowledge BaseI use it all the time and it has features that make it useful for a humble FAQ.