Zugg Software :: View topic - Idea: Date / time of last modification added to help files

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

It would be useful if the date and time of the last modification of a help file was listed at the bottom. (I know it is possible to see it from the Knowledge Base forum, but not from the actual help page, and not from CMUD.)

Also, if when you did a check for updates it brought up a dialog with how many topics had changed, and you could click to get a report of which topics had changed and click on them directly to view them.

Wanderer Joined: 03 Nov 2000 Posts: 59

I'll second this. The regular documentation updates are fantastic, and would be even more so with a "what's new" feature so we can quickly review the changes.

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 6:14 pm

Good ideas. The timestamp is certainly stored in the database, so it should be easy to display it, and even sort on it to see the latest updates first. A "What's New" section would definitely be useful. Easy to do in the CMUD Help program. It would be a lot more work to do this on the web site for the online pages, so I probably won't bother with that for now.

Posted: Sat Feb 10, 2007 6:22 pm

There's already one on the website as part of the sidebar when you access the xxx Support page. Not to mention the KB forum itself. So I don't think it needs another one.

In the program itself, though, it'd be useful.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

Of course, being able to see exactly what had changed (like a diff) would be really useful too...

As I suggested here or as part of CMUD/CMUD Help Viewer.

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 6:37 pm

Being able to see what changed (like a diff) won't be implemented for a long time. That requires major changes to how the Knowledge Base stores data in it's database in order to track changes. It has nothing to do with CMUD or an external help viewer...the change data just doesn't exist in the database.

Getting a list of what topics changed is about all I'll be able to do for now.

Wizard Joined: 03 Mar 2001 Posts: 1127 Location: London

Almost need a read-only wiki, would give much of the right functionality out of the box

Posted: Mon Feb 12, 2007 10:32 pm

Guinn, the current Knowledge Base is already similar to a Wiki. The Gurus have write access to the topics, for example, and can edit the help topics via their web browser.

The problem is that this particular "wiki" doesn't keep track of changes like some of the others do. This is just the Wiki module that came with the MX Portal CMS system that I installed on the site several years ago.

Over time, I have heavily modified the Knowledge Base so that it creates the related topic index on the left automatically. I also modified it to use some custom bbcode tags that this site uses. So other Wiki's are not going to provide our current functionality "out of the box".

So, just replacing the current Knowledge Base with some other Wiki would be extremely time consuming. First, there are very few Wikis that support the bbcode that I want to use for writing articles. Next, it needs to be PHP and use MySQL. Then it would need a Commenting system that integrates with the PHPBB stuff, and the Wiki login would need to be integrated with the PHPBB login system. Then I'd have to modify it to perform the auto-creation of the related topics index. It's a *lot* of work. It would actually be easier to add the history tracking to the current system, although that's still a lot of work.

Not to mention that even just showing the "diffs" in a readable format would be a pain. Novice users aren't going to want to see the normal "Added" and "Deleted" markup stuff.

Not the kind of stuff I need to be distracted with right now.