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?

Answer 1

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/

Answer 2

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 }
        );

Answer 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.