Integrate context-sensitive help in web application

Question

I've come across this requirement many times in the past, and I'm facing it again... I have a client that wants context-sensitive help (with icons next to fields/sections on pages). They want their marketing team to manage the help content from a user-friendly environment where they can manage categories, sub-categories, help pages, and help "snippets," with rich-text support (font size/weight, bulleted lists, etc.). Each piece of content would have some unique identifier.

On the web application side, developers would be able to tie an item on the page (eg a form field) to a unique id within the help content, and that content would dynamically display on click. But, the user would need to see content within its context (showing category, subcategory, etc.), and navigate/search the rest of the help content easily.

One option is to manage the help content in a tool like Atlassian Confluence, and use its API to display content, then have a custom HTML attribute containing the unique id of the content, with JavaScript to ajax-load the content based on the unique id. Of course, this requires licenses for Confluence, which may be cost-prohibitive for the client.

I've used RoboHelp for this in the past, but it costs $999 per seat...

Does anyone have other ideas for an approach that meets these needs, and is user, developer, and budget-friendly?

Answer 1

Leveraging an external source to manage help content is a sound idea. You can mitigate cost issues by choosing any inexpensive, or even free, wiki/blog like Wordpress. Even inexpensive solutions should offer the rich editors, categories and all, not to mention meet any security concerns you might have.

Answer 2

您可以使用CKEditor编辑管理页面上的内容，您只需将其保存到数据库中以获取给定的URL（可以编辑字段中的URL），然后将其加载到每个页面上。