All,
I have a Web 2.0 application written in Zend Framework and MVC. My application is growing bigger and bigger and I need to come up with a Help system for the entire application. I like the Xero's help interface and was wondering if there's an easy way to create this in PHP5 and Zend or if there are any PHP based tools that I can integrate with my application.
I also like the WIKI but not sure which wiki to use and how to use it.
Regards
While I don't know of any PHP-based tools specifically aimed managing a pile of help documents, but I'm sure there's stuff out there.
Xero's help front-end is built on the ExtJS component library. In fact, it's directly derived from the ExtJS API Docs. So getting a slick UI is pretty easy.
It should be fairly easy to reverse-engineer how the client/server conversation is going, and come up with a server-side program to provide the web services the help-center code would need. It seems like it just manages some heirarchical data (for the help topic tree), and just loads what could be static HTML for the actual article content. Zend's MVC stuff makes implementing such services pretty straight-forward.
I would guess you could probably get a minimally functional help system written in a few days.
Of course, you might spend more time building an administration tool for your writers to use to create and organize all the help articles.
http://www.opensource-it.com/open_source_wiki_software
Here's a list of open source Wiki Software.
I've built a wiki based context sensitive help system using ZF. Article here. Not as whizzy as Xero's but a left nav like theirs shouldn't be too hard to add...
http://www.lightlysalted.co.nz/2010/03/context-sensitive-help-in-zend-framework/