faq-system users guide

1. What it is?

Well, what the hell is it? In short hands: a few cgi-scripts to maintain a faq-database very easy. Most of these scripts are written in C++, so you have to compile them, before using! Please read the file INSTALL to learn, how to install the package.

Note - this is BETA software! As such, it may have a few bugs, that may cause lost of data or such things. I recommend you to test the software with a dummy database.

2. Overview

If you click on a question, a new site appears where you can read the answer.

And it generates the Index page(s). You can distribute ths Index as you want, i.e. to another webserver. no additionally software is required to read the Index. There are two versions of the Index, that you can create. The first is the "large" mode. In this version, only one page will be created from db_reload.cgi. Since such a file can become very large, you may want to have one page per topic. Exactly this is the second mode, the "topic" mode. In both modes, the linkstructure is generated with the use of anchors.

You can everytime change someting in the system configuration, i.e. the webserver, where it runs, or the database name or the Index-mode. You will never have to change something to the database. In other words, you can install the system on another host, distribute the database to this host (with mysqldump) and you can simply work on on it.

The html output generated from all programs is very simple, to make it available to a wide range of users with different browsers. Personally I have tested it with navigator 3.0, Communicator 4.5 and the IE3.0 (IE4.0 should work too).

While the software provides you an easy to use interface to a database via your browser, you need knowledge about databases and webserver configuration anyway. I recommend you to read the apache and mysql documentation on their websites to learn more about these complex software packages.
 
 

3. Usage

There are the following links available from res.html:

• [ reload site ] this generates all static stuff new from the database, which is the res.html and the fullindex.html (and topic-sites)
• [ search ] the search site, you can specifiy your search with various options, see yourself
• [ full index ] the complete Index
• [ help ] probably this site
• [ new topic ]  you can create a new topic
• [ ask ] you can insert a new question into the database, which will be related to the topic, where the link was
• [ answer ] answer to a question. You can insert more then one answer to the database
• [ modify ] you can modify a database field

• Support for "templates". You can use your own header and footer, which will be included into the Index-files. If you do not use tihs feature, a default header and footer will be created. See more aout this topic in the file INSTALL
• Support for "dynamic link generation" (DLG). This means, you can refer from the Index-file to another part of the Index. But since you may not exactly know, what the target-name is, you can use this feature.
  First, take a look to the res.html and the question to where you want to link. You can see a line like this:
  2.1. What is a question? [[ _2_1 ]] [ answer ] [ modify ].
  Between the [[ ... ]] You can see the "internal" name of this question. Now go to your answer, wehre you want to refer to this location. Type the following construction:
  ##_2_1#see also section 2.1.#. The system generates a hyperlink to this location, whereever it is. Note: two "##" starts the DLG, from now on until the next "#" appears the content will be used as destination for the link. After this "#" til the last "#" the content will be the caption of the link. If the system cannot find a string like _NUMBER_NUMBER (note the leading underscores), the string will not interpreted. For example you can create a link to IBM: "##http://www.ibm.net#IBM#".

4. License

The whole packe is provided under the GPL(GNU General Public License). This means, that you can freely redistribute, modify or something else do with the programs. But it would be very nice if you can drop me a line when changing something, because it could be needful for the public so I could integrate it into the package. My Email adress is tom@daemon.de. But do not mail me something other then related to faq-system. thx.

Refer to the file COPYING to know more about the GPL.