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Knowledgebase Plugin

Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Please don't report issues here; use https://github.com/alexbevi/redmine_knowledgebase

Where I work, there has been a need for a knowledgebase solution that was (a) robust, (b) integrated with our project management solution, and (c) ... free.

Since we use Redmine internally, it made sense to build this functionality on top of the existing platform. Most of what you can accomplish through a knowledgebase, you can accomplish through a wiki, but our users were looking for a hierarchical system that would track page views, rankings and be fully searchable.

The system I've written isn't really there yet, but it's a work in progress I'd like to present to the community on the off chance that someone else finds it useful.

There's still quite a bit to do, but open source development is more fun when done in the open :)


Replies (123)

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

(sorry, forgot to add the images to the description)

Index Page

Article View

Category View

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

And if anyone wants to see it in action, I'll have an updated version running at http://projects.alexbevi.com/knowledgebase

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Jeffrey Jones over 14 years ago

It looks good but what are the advantages of using this over the wiki functionality built-in to RedMine?

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Jeffrey Jones wrote:

It looks good but what are the advantages of using this over the wiki functionality built-in to RedMine?

At this point ... none. There are still several features missing that I'm hoping to get implemented (mainly searching, commenting, ratings and multiple categorization).

The whole point of this project was that we needed something like PHPKB, which is also where a lot of the interface ideas came from.

I don't really expect most users to use this as a "replacement" for wiki functionality, as that should serve most people's needs quite nicely. Where a knowledgebase comes in handy is when you want to track certain metrics about each article, which I plan on doing, then summarizing that to help users find relevant information.

Where I work, we looked into using the wiki functionality (within Redmine) as a client-facing knowledgebase, but where it fell short was that it was project-specific. We needed something generic, so we looked at MediaWiki, but that didn't quite fit either because we were linking back to Redmine a lot for documents that were managed within certain projects.

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

I've now added a better index summary and a rating system

I'm hoping that some other plugin developers may be able to help me with searching though. I'm hoping to hook into the overall searching subsystem of redmine (as opposed to just rolling my own). I'm just not really sure where to start looking. Any pointers are appreciated :)

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

ugh. Just NOT having luck with these screenshots :P

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Christophe Galibert over 14 years ago

Alex,

your plugin looks very promising, and is very near of what I was looking for for our team Redmine.

For your concerns about the "search" integration in the whole Redmine, perhaps you may have a look at the way it is achieved in the ezFaq plugin: all we had to do to include it in the "global" search" of our Redmine was a small addition of the "faq" to the list of "searched" models in the "search_controler.rb" file (see below).

@object_types = %w(issues news documents changesets wiki_pages messages projects faqs)

I think that global search "extension" be improved (no more hard-coded) in Redmine 1.0 release (see http://www.redmine.org/issues/3936).

I hope it helps, and congratulations for your nice plugin !

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Michael Schiller over 14 years ago

Hi Alex,

a very interesting plugin for redmine!

I got an error after creating or updating of an article. My log:

...
NoMethodError (undefined method `attach_files' for #<Class:0xafbf84c>):
vendor/plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/app/controllers/articles_controller.rb:47:in `update'

Any idea?

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Roland Discein over 14 years ago

Change

attach_files

to

Attachment.attach_files

in your code and dont forget to check if

  helper :attachments
  include AttachmentsHelper

exists in here.

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Michael Schiller wrote:

Hi Alex,

a very interesting plugin for redmine!

I got an error after creating or updating of an article. My log:

[...]

Any idea?

Make sure you're using the latest version, because I can't recreate this issue.

Roland, I am doing that, but didn't have the include AttachmentsHelper in the controller. Haven't had any issues, but I'll add it for good measure :)

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Michael Schiller over 14 years ago

I changed the code but there is the same problem. Redmine is the newest version. Your plugin too (from github). I have many other plugins installed: Perhaps this is the problem...

There is no class method attach_files in Attachment class:

script/console production
>> Attachment.attach_files
=> NoMethodError: 
   undefined method `attach_files' for #<Class:0xb3052b8>

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Francesco Trigger over 14 years ago

Hi i am new to redmine but i got the same problem trying to attach a file to an article:

Processing ArticlesController#update (for 217.67.37.200 at 2010-04-28 11:52:43) [PUT]
  Parameters: {"article"=>{"title"=>"ESX Hardware Installation Instructions", "content"=>"bla", "summary"=>"bla"}, "commit"=>"Update", "action"=>"update", "_$

NoMethodError (undefined method `attach_files' for #<Class:0xb68375b4>):
  vendor/plugins/redmine_knowledgebase/app/controllers/articles_controller.rb:48:in `update'

Rendering /opt/bitnami/apps/redmine/public/500.html (500 Internal Server Error)

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Francesco Trigger wrote:

Hi i am new to redmine but i got the same problem trying to attach a file to an article:

[...]

My apologies everyone. I couldn't reproduce this issue ... until today :P I checked out the latest stable redmine and tried the kb plugin (and got the same error). It looks like attach_files wasn't refactored into the Attachments model until recently, so a lot of installs still have it in the application controller. I've added a quick fix in my articles controller to address this.

Please checkout the latest version from github and let me know if there are any further issues ;)

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Francesco Trigger over 14 years ago

Perfect! Works like a charm! ^^ Mille Grazie!

Just another LITTLE Bug, probably you will be able to change that in a swift.

if i am navigating through the Jump to Category Pull down i can not do that, because it cuts the path, so instead of:

redmine/knowledgebase/articles/3

the path becomes

knowledgebase/articles/3

and i can only edit the path by hand.

Do you have a solution for that?

Regards,

Francesco

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Francesco Trigger wrote:

Perfect! Works like a charm! ^^ Mille Grazie!

Just another LITTLE Bug, probably you will be able to change that in a swift.

if i am navigating through the Jump to Category Pull down i can not do that, because it cuts the path, so instead of:

redmine/knowledgebase/articles/3

the path becomes

knowledgebase/articles/3

and i can only edit the path by hand.

Do you have a solution for that?

Regards,

Francesco

Check out this change here and let me know if that addresses your question (if so, I'll just pull it into my code)

http://github.com/michaxy/redmine_knowledgebase/commit/e3217f11bc08b4853af965d4fbafb394878e38cf

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Francesco Trigger over 14 years ago

Jup worked! Nice! Thanks!

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Eraldo Girardi over 14 years ago

This is just what I was looking for. Great plugin.
Default Redmine Wiki is really too simple:
  • no way to create new page in a friendly GUI way (noob proof)
  • no way to use a hierarchical system to organize pages
  • ...

Your plugin is really useful but it lack a really important feature (for me):
Document versioning

Is there a way to implement versioning in your plugin?
Maybe it can be ripped from wiki, I don't know..
I'm really new to ruby but I'd happy to help if I could.
Sure I can translate in italian --> just waiting for multilang support

Thanks for your work

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Eraldo Girardi wrote:

This is just what I was looking for. Great plugin.
Default Redmine Wiki is really too simple:
  • no way to create new page in a friendly GUI way (noob proof)
  • no way to use a hierarchical system to organize pages
  • ...

Your plugin is really useful but it lack a really important feature (for me):
Document versioning

Is there a way to implement versioning in your plugin?
Maybe it can be ripped from wiki, I don't know..
I'm really new to ruby but I'd happy to help if I could.
Sure I can translate in italian --> just waiting for multilang support

Thanks for your work

I'm always open to suggestions ;)

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

I've added a new feature to the knowledgebase ... TAGGING

Tagging Screenshot

As always, this is still preliminary and needs refining, but it's functional for all intents and purposes :P

ss-tags.png (50.6 KB) ss-tags.png Tagging Screenshot

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Eraldo Girardi over 14 years ago

Alex Bevilacqua wrote:

I've added a new feature to the knowledgebase ... TAGGING

CUT

As always, this is still preliminary and needs refining, but it's functional for all intents and purposes :P

That's very nice!

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Francesco Trigger over 14 years ago

Hmmm i have a question, if i am going to update by git pull
afterwards i get an error 500.

i do this
git stash
git pull
git stash pop

reboot

afterwards klicking on the knowledgebase everything is fine. but clicking on an existing article gives me error 500.

any idea? This happend after updating the tagging update.

Regards

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Francesco Trigger wrote:

Hmmm i have a question, if i am going to update by git pull
afterwards i get an error 500.

i do this
git stash
git pull
git stash pop

reboot

afterwards klicking on the knowledgebase everything is fine. but clicking on an existing article gives me error 500.

any idea? This happend after updating the tagging update.

Regards

did you do a rake db:migrate_plugins to ensure the database was up to date?

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

if that doesn't work, can you send me the excerpt from your production log (or development log, depending on what RAILS_ENV you're using :P)

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Francesco Trigger over 14 years ago

Thanks Alex,

nevermind :D I did not sleep much last night. really forgot to rake :P

Are you going to implement a search for the tags?

RE: Knowledgebase Plugin - Added by Alex Bevilacqua over 14 years ago

Francesco Trigger wrote:

Thanks Alex,

nevermind :D I did not sleep much last night. really forgot to rake :P

Are you going to implement a search for the tags?

I'm going to eventually implement searching, so it should include tags, titles, summaries and content. Still planning that feature out though ;)

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