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Chapter 12 Online Help System IN THIS CHAPTER . Developing an online help system . Installing an online help system . Using an online help system HAVING ONLINE HELP with your Web or intranet applications can be a great blessing, because it may reduce user support calls and, therefore, cost. In this chapter, you ll develop an online help system that can be used for any of the Web or intranet applications developed in this book. First, let s look at the functionality you want the help system to offer. Functionality Requirements The help system will offer the following features. . Structured help contents: The system will assume a structured help con tent design where help for an application will be divided into sections. Each section will be represented with one or more HTML pages, which may or may not have embedded images. Each section will have a number like x.y.z where x is the section number, y is the second level subsection number, and z is the third level subsection number. For example, 1.0.0.html, 1.1.0.html, and 1.1.1.html are pages for section 1. The images for all the help contents will be stored in an images directory. . Automatic table of contents page: The system should generate the table of contents page automatically. This feature is very good to have because you can then add or remove sections. . Automatic navigation: The system should generate automatic navigation links from section to section and also have a link to the table of contents from each page.

Chapter 11: Internet Resource Manager 401 Security Concerns Now you have a set of intranet applications that allow you to add/modify/delete Internet site resources. Since these applications are run from your intranet they are only accessible to your intranet users who must authenticate using the central authentication system developed in Chapter 5. However, if you needed to restrict access to these applications even further using some other special schema such as IP subnet or time, you can incorporate such custom authorization requirements in the authorize() methods for each of these applications. Summary In this chapter, you learned to create an Internet Resource Manager for your intranet. This application allows users to organize the resources on a shareable and searchable central database.

400 Part II: Developing Intranet Solutions Figure 11-12: The most visited Internet resources. Figure 11-13: The top-ranking Internet resources.

Chapter 11: Internet Resource Manager 399 You can use the result titles such as Resource Title, Resource Rating, and Added By User to sort the results. To view the description of the resource, click on the Desc link. Figure 11-11 shows that the same resource can be found by entering a search parameter in the search interface. Figure 11-11: Using search parameters to find resources. To find the most visited resources, click on the Show Most Visited Resources link on the search interface. You will see a screen similar to Figure 11-12. Remember that whenever a user clicks on a resource, it is tracked and this information is used to generate the most-visit data. To find the highest-ranking resources, click on the Show Top Ranking Sites on the Search interface. You will see a screen similar to Figure 11-13.

398 Part II: Developing Intranet Solutions Figure 11-9: A new resource in the search interface. Figure 11-10: Contents of a subcategory.

Chapter 11: Internet Resource Manager 397 To add a new resource, click on the Add URL link (http://server//irm/apps/ irm_resource_mngr.php?cmd=add&step=1) shown on the title bar of the search interface. This brings up a screen similar to Figure 11-8. Figure 11-8: Adding a new Internet resource. First, select the main category and subcategory before adding any data. Make sure you enter a valid URL, because the system will try to contact the URL and if it fails it will not add it in the database. Enter keywords, descriptions, titles, and rating as appropriate. If you want the resource to be announced to others via the intranet messaging system, you should select the Auto Announce option and select the users who should receive this announcements. Finally submit the form. The resource will be added to the appropriate subcategory. After adding a resource, you can access it via the search interface by clicking on the subcategory or using keywords or other search parameters to locate it. Figure 11-9 show that we have added a new resource under the PHP subcategory in the Language category. Clicking on the PHP subcategory shows what you see in Figure 11-10.

396 Part II: Developing Intranet Solutions Figure 11-6: A category with a single subcategory. Figure 11-7: A list of categories with subcategories shown on the search interface.

Chapter 11: Internet Resource Manager 395 Click on the Add Category button and you will see a screen similar to Figure 11-5. Figure 11-5: Adding a new category. Enter a new category name. If this is a subcategory of an existing category, select the parent category from the available categories. Finally, click on the Add Category button to add the new category. As mentioned in the functionality requirements, the Internet resources are only added in subcategories. There can be only one-level subcategories for each main category. So you should add at least one subcategory per main category. Figure 11-6 shows a new category called Languages with the PHP subcategory. Keep adding categories and subcategories as you need. Figure 11-7 shows a list of categories with subcategories that we ve created for this test.

394 Part II: Developing Intranet Solutions Figure 11-3: The IRM search interface. Figure 11-4: The Category Manager.

Chapter 11: Internet Resource Manager 393 Say your database server is called db.domain.com and the user name and password to access the INTRANET and auth databases (which you will create during this installation process) are admin and db123. In such a case, you would modify the database access URLs throughout each configuration file as follows: $INTRA_DB_URL = mysql://admin:db123@db.domain.com/INTRANET ; $IRM_DB_URL = mysql://admin:db123@db.domain.com/IRM ; $APP_DB_URL = mysql://admin:db123@db.domain.com/auth ; . Add IRM to the Theme Navigation Bar. You need to update your theme navigation bar files stored in %DocumentRoot%/themes/%theme%/ home_left_nav.html, whenever you add a new application. For example, to update the std_blue theme, you need to update the %DocumentRoot%/ themes/std_blue/home_left_nav.html file to include the following line in the HTML table:
IRM

This will create a new row in the left navigation bar created with the HTML table. . Set File/Directory Permissions. Make sure you have changed file and directory permissions such that your intranet Web server can access all the files. After you ve performed the preceding steps, you re ready to test your IRM applications. Testing IRM Log in to your intranet via http://yourserver/index.php or http://yourserver/ home/home.php. Click on the Calendar link on the left navigation bar of your intranet home page, or point your Web browser to http://yourserver/irm/apps/irm_search_mngr. php after you re logged in to the intranet. This will show you the IRM search interface as shown in Figure 11-3. You will notice that there are no resources set up, because we haven t yet set up categories. To set up categories, click on the Category Manager as an administrative user. You will see a screen similar to Figure 11-4.