#208 Knowledge base for Fedora
Closed: Fixed None Opened 16 years ago by sundaram.

I would like to lead a knowledge base for Fedora at http://kbase.fedoraproject.org. Similar to http://kbase.redhat.com which I was involved with heavily before. Features that are desirable include

  • Tagging/Categories
  • Top issues listing based on categories and views
  • Search (including search by categories)
  • View by last updated (variable length)
  • Multiple editors.
  • Anyone can ask a question or submit their own faq and editors can approved those.
  • Allow feedback on existing faqs and emails must be send to both the writer as well as the editor(s) approving the faq. Writer must be allowed to edit their own faq's later.
  • Allow anyone to watch any FAQs or all FAQ in any categories for updates
  • Allow anyone to email a link to others easily
  • Reporting on which FAQ's are popular or getting more feedback to editors

I'm assuming that the software being used for the Red Hat knowledge base is proprietary? What other software options are available?

IIRC, the company that provided the software to Red Hat is dead. We have the code but I don't know the licensing agreements involved and it is in Java which you probably don't want to touch.

Plone has a FAQ module but it has been promised for years and never delivered so I don't know what's the current situation. If we are going with Drupal, see

http://drupal.org/node/53070

One of the Red Hat folks are upstream for klear (PHP)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/klear

Haven't evaluated all the alternatives in detail.

Who's going to be the target authors? If it's the docs team we should probably get them involved now and see if they have something else in mind.

The work I'm doing on getting the docs platform up is not a blocker for getting some Plone instances up. Does the infra team want help on setting up some test plone 3 instances to test out, for example, the FAQ product? The news abilities?

I provide RSS feeds of the RH kbase content that a number of people subscribe to. It would be nice to provide something like that for a Fedora kbase.

[http://spindazzle.org/greenblog/index.php?/archives/58-RSS-feeds-for-the-Red-Hat-Knowledgebase.html]

It's a scraper written in java, which I'm happy to share - but I suspect that if we roll-our-own kbase app then we can provide our own feed infrastructure.

Replying to [comment:5 mmcgrath]:

Who's going to be the target authors? If it's the docs team we should probably get them involved now and see if they have something else in mind.

Authors are hopefully going to be much more than just Docs folks. Anyone who helps on #fedora, for example; fedoraforum.org users; and so forth.

Due to the nature of the content (web only), we should be able to use a click-through CLA. That means we can require a basic FAS account, etc.

In terms of Docs team involvement, Rahul basically has the ball to run with here. He has been championing the idea for some time, and we all agree a kbase fills a need that regular, full-length documents don't provide.

To fit this into responsibility areas, we can consider this to be a sub-project of Docs, meaning we'll be responsible to helping to set standards, processes, supply some editors, train people, etc. As Rahul points out, he is capable of leading the effort.

Replying to [comment:4 sundaram]:

Haven't evaluated all the alternatives in detail.

Recommend that we have this discussion on f-infra-l. Docs can help set the list of requirements, and I think Rahul has done that already. This means the choice of which app F Infra wants to maintain is really up to the Infra team.

Rahul, are you the project lead for this?

Any progress on this? Red Hat KBase folks are in favor of keeping the Fedora content separate from http://kbase.redhat.com which is a view point I agree with this. We can't reuse Red Hat's solution and still need to find a alternative good kbase solution for our needs.

Let me know if i can help in this.

So there are two things we need to do here afaik:

a. Evaluate a soln like drupal or plone and see what works best for us.

b. Involve the docs team and/or figure out how people would author the docs.

I was looking at phpMyFAQ (http://www.phpmyfaq.de/) and i think that it could be relevant to this request. I requested some feedback from the infrastructure team and the possibility to demo it.

https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-infrastructure-list/2009-June/msg00004.html

closing as not enough time

Is there help required to start it? What kind of?

I have recently started working on

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Askbot

Need help with packaging and reviewing.

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