Web application: Creating searchable application help

Question

When building a web application's help section, what are the preferred tools?

Specifically, I'd like to make a searchable set of help documents.

I'm hoping there are more specialized tools than just good ol' fashioned HTML / database backend.

Answer 1

You could use some sort of support ticketing / FAQ system. There is Zen Desk for instance. However, I'm sure if you look around you will find some great open source alternatives.

If you simply want a searchable set of help documents ... you could simply create a 'help' blog, so to speak, you can add content fairly easily and all blog entries will be searchable. I understand Wordpress is pretty popular in this domain.

Edit: The guys over at Campaign Monitor have a nifty little resources section which has some help articles. As you can see its fairly basic and straightforward - thus making it a lot easier to navigate around.