Monday, August 12, 2013

FAQ Management: You can haz unlimited knowledge bases!

Pam Sessoms 12:10 PM

Today we reintroduced the FAQ tab within the admin site. That's right. It's back and better than ever! And in-place editing still works. So now, you can work on your FAQ in-place or via the admin site.

The FAQ tab, like the recently updated Services designer, is another step on the road toward an improved and easier to use admin site that incorporates the helpful feedback you've provided. As with the patron-facing side of FAQs and our modernization of the open source Library a la Carte CMS, we're using Bootstrap.

Highlights

Unlimited FAQ sites. Create as many sites as you'd like. Maybe per different departments or area. You are only limited by your own imagination. Unlimited knowledge bases are included with every subscription at no additional cost.
No charge for custom URLs. Plug in your own CNAME (local URL).
Optional password protection. Great for creating internal FAQ sites.
Context-sensitive help. Click the green "Show me how this works" button at the top of the page to activate.
Full revision history for answers and template code. Make an editing error in one of your answers or templates? Easily revert back to your prior version. You can even reset templates back to their original defaults. You can also see when each change was made, and by which user.

Revision history lets you easily step through all changes to answer text (and template code).
You can also see which user made each change, and when they did so.

You can learn more about the FAQ, and especially customization, in our Library a la Carte-backed docs.

Nitty-gritty: permissions

By default, admins and admin-level users can edit FAQ questions and templates. And, any user who creates their own FAQ can edit it.

But we have a flexible permissions system available. Until it is fully exposed in the user interface, you can email our support account to tweak the default permissions. For example, you can extend FAQ editing permissions to any or all users. You can even have some users able to edit only questions but not templates.

And of course, each FAQ site can have different permissions.

Bottom line: Need permissions tweaked? Ask us.

Known gotchas

~~The Ad Block Plus browser extension can cause the FAQ (and Services) tabs to appear blank. We hope to develop a workaround for that.~~

~~Revision history for answers and templates is populated at page load. To see all available versions, including those from the current editing session, reload (right-click, reload frame).~~ Fixed!