Products.PloneHelpCenter 4.0a1

A simple help-desk style documentation product for Plone.

If you are upgrading an existing PHC installation, you must read INSTALL.txt.

Overview

Plone Help Center is an application designed to aid the documentation of Plone, and is used on plone.org to categorize and keep documentation up to date. It should be usable for documenting other open source products (such as Plone Product add-ons) or even for other documentation projects.

Usage

Plone Help Center has inline documentation, just add a help center.

What’s New in 3.0

The underlying architecture of previous versions of PHC was basically Plone 2.0. It was built on Archetypes without ATContentTypes. Features like next/previous navigation and automatic tables of contents were all built in. In many way, PHC was a test center for new Plone features.

However, Plone advanced and PHC did not.

PHC 3 is much less ambitious. Rather than trying to add new features to Plone, this version seeks to inherit Plone 3 features by reimplementing most of the PHC content types as ATCT-derived classes that automatically implement Plone 3 behavior. PHC-specific features are added via sub-classing or interfaces/adapters.

Requirements

PloneHelpCenter requires:

• Plone 3.0 or later

Installation

See the Installing an Add-on Product tutorial for more detailed product installation instructions.

Upgrades

If you are upgrading a Plone site with an existing help center from a version prior to 3.0, you must run the upgrade profile.

Step by step follow this order

Do not upgrade from PHC 1.6.x on Plone 3.x to PHC 4.x in Plone 4.x in one step.

Update first to Plone 3.3.5+ with:

Products.PloneHelpCenter = 1.6.2
Products.AddRemoveWidget = 1.4.2

Check if example content is present! Then update buildout to:

Products.PloneHelpCenter = 3.0b3

run:

bin/buildout -v

* restart instance and

* deinstall Products.PloneHelpCenter 3.0b3

* install Products.PloneHelpCenter 3.0b3

* in the ZMI go to:  Generic Setup Tool at  /acsr/portal_setup  Tab "Upgrades"

* after selecting: "Products.PloneHelpCenter:default" and clicking "Choose Profile" you get first::

    Upgrades

    The profile "Products.PloneHelpCenter:default" is currently upgraded to version 3.0b3.

    The filesystem version for the "Products.PloneHelpCenter:default" profile is currently 3.0b3.

    No upgrade available.

* Now click at -> Show old upgrades: "show" an see::

    Available upgrades:
    Upgrade Step Group
    ->              Upgrading the types
    (0.0 → 3.0)

* select the item and run the upgrade

* you get::

    Upgrades

    The profile "Products.PloneHelpCenter:default" is currently upgraded to version 3.0.

    The filesystem version for the "Products.PloneHelpCenter:default" profile is currently 3.0b3.

    No upgrade available.

Content should be back again!

Optional

AddRemoveWidget – PLEASE NOTE: if AddRemoveWidget is installed as a Zope product, you must also install it in Plone. If it is present without being installed, errors will occur.

Installing with buildout

If you are using buildout to manage your instance installing Plone Help Center is very simple. You can install it by adding it to the eggs line for your instance:

[instance]
eggs = Products.PloneHelpCenter

If another egg package depends on Products.PloneHelpCenter you do not need to specify anything in the buildout configuration: buildout will detect this automatically.

After updating the configuration you need to run the ‘’bin/buildout’’, which will take care of updating your system.

Installing without buildout

Move (or symlink) the PloneHelpCenter folder of this project (Products.PloneHelpCenter/Products/PloneHelpCenter) into the Products directory of the Zope instance it has to be installed for, and restart the server.

You may also download a traditional tarball that you unpack into Products from http://plone.org/products/PloneHelpCenter .

Credits

Project Architecture, Development, Content Types, Archetypes, Workflow: Joel Burton

Development, User Interface, Project Architecture, Quality Assurance: Alexander Limi

Development, persistence and all-round brilliance: Martin “optilude” Aspeli

Development, Assistance: Christian “Tiran” Heimes

Original FAQ code: Tim Terlegard, Edward Muller - further enhancements by Jean-Paul Ladage and Ahmad Hadi from Zest Software

Fixing various stuff, documentation: The Sprinters: Christian Heimes, Dorneles Tremea, Daniel Nouri, Nate Aune

Added optional “see also” references to other Archetypes based types: Jens “jensens” Klein

i18n improvements: And general fixes in some templates and brazilian translations by Jean Ferri

Bugfixes and occasional Quality Assurance: Geir Baekholt

Topic, start-here, and 1.0 search options: The 2007 documentation sprint participants, particularly aclark, joelburton, magnon and stevem. Plone.Org view skin by vedawms.

Numerous 1.0 presentation fixes: Servilio Afre Puentes.

Version 3.0 refactoring: Steve McMahon

Migration for Plone 4.0: Fabio Rizzo from Liberiun.com and Israel Saeta Pérez.