Re: Help Systems in Web Application - Any ideas..

Hey Shane,

To add a little bit on the wiki server.  There are several REST plugins you
can add to various CMS to allow this to appear seemless.  For instance if
you were using WordPress or wanted to make that available there's a plugin
you can add to make available all the content via JSON.  Then the client
can manage the content via the WYSIWYG in WordPress and you can simply
write your app to render that content in your app.

Not that you couldn't use the Domino server, or Wiki, but there might be
other CMS options with better integration support.  Other options I've
heard mentioned at good alternatives are Druple or Joomala.  I know there's
also Java-based ones, but not sure of their integration.  In short not
reinventing the wheel would be my key goal.  You have enough to worry about
and probably don't need to have a "home-grown cms" added to the list.

-Adam


On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Shane Pettit <[email protected]>
wrote:

> My gut reaction was to initially serialize everything to a blob as we do
> not really have a setup to support media formats.  However, I do like the
> concept of using a wiki as it would have the ability to handle the WYSIWYG
> editing out of the box, including support for the various content types.
> That's essentially what the Domino server is providing, so it would be a
> very similar implementation.
>
> I think with a bit of styling and integration, that would be a great
> solution giving the most flexibility.
>
> Thanks again guys - sometimes I get the four wall syndrome and it's good
> to have a group to reach out to when you feel like you're headed down the
> rabbit hole.
>
>
> On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 9:16 PM, Marc Mamane <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> Hi Shane,
>>
>> I'm currently working on a similar project involving web based PDF
>> generation.  The PDFs are generated from HTML templates.  All templates and
>> images are stored in the db.  The HTML is saved as text, and the images are
>> stored separately as blobs.  It's pretty simple to convert the images to
>> byte arrays and commit them to the db using hibernate.
>>
>> Our only real gotcha was handling the image tag SRC attribute.  We ended
>> up creating an additional rest service which accepts a byte array, commits
>> it to the db, and returns a token that can be used to retrieve an image
>> stream via a "getByToken" method.  This allowed us to streamline all of our
>> image URLs, ie http://service?token=id.
>>
>> Our templates are currently created manually.  Now that the templates can
>> be parsed, saved and successfully reassembled we want to add a WYSIWYG.
>> The textAngular project has my eye but we haven't settled on anything yet.
>>
>> I'm also interested in any advice on that front.
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Marc
>>  On Sep 5, 2014 1:17 PM, "Shane Pettit" <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Greetings,
>>>
>>> I'm reaching out to the members here to see if anyone has worked with a
>>> requirement where they were asked to produce an in-application help system
>>> that renders mixed content (Text + Images).
>>>
>>> This is the first time I've had this request and was wanting to get some
>>> ideas / best practices around producing this in an web application
>>> environment.
>>>
>>> Our stack is a common web stack utilizing Spring/Hibernate on the
>>> backend with a Dojo client on the front end.
>>>
>>> The tricky part about this is that they want to be able to produce
>>> page/context specific help with the ability to do inline updates to the
>>> help files, linking back to this throughout the application.
>>>
>>> In the legacy system, they leveraged some Domino CMS features to achieve
>>> this.. however, this feels like something a CMS would do well versus
>>> building an inhouse solution, but I am not aware of any third part
>>> solutions.  The other aspect is that they have to be i18n compliant and
>>> will contain images - so storage will be mixed content.
>>>
>>> We do not have a media server, nor are they willing to purchase one -
>>> which makes storing the images a bit tricky as they are pasted inline as
>>> the content is edited.
>>>
>>> Thus, any advice/help in a direction that is both effective and
>>> implementable by a small team would be great.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> -DaCrazyCoder aka (Shane)
>>>
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-- 
Adam Brons
[email protected]

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