What is your experience integrating WebHelp into your site?

[beagley]

Hi,
We have a joomla Web site, a drupal-CMS based Web site, and several simple HTML Web sites with CSS.

What I've seen people do with Flare output so far is just put up a link on their site that launches a new WebHelp dedicated window.

Does anyone have experience creating a tighter integration? We spend a lot of time creating the frame and navigation tools of our Web sites... I would kind of like Flare to produce content that would drop into that frame, not create its own interface...

Totally newbie here,
-d

[RamonS]

I looked into that some time ago using Joomla (found that to work better than Drupal) and what would be nice is if Flare and especially Mimic could generate content that follows the common eLearning standards or if MadCap could provide an extension to Drupal and Joomla for simply integrating help.
You could put support into Joomla and Drupal yourself by using my PHP CSH module for Flare's WebHelp, see http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewto ... =12&t=5232

[beagley]

Interesting... your tool allows CSH calls from a PHP program... just like the URL method described in the MadCap's help library? So... it opens up a WebHelp window, or it somehow grabs the content of a topic and displays it within our drupal-based CMS? That would be pretty cool... I think.

I'm still at the early stages of deciding what the best user experience will be, honestly. Maybe, for consistency between calls from our software and calls from our Web site, a WebHelp window with a skin based on our marketing stylebook would be the way to go. I dunno.

[RamonS]

Yes, it uses the URL method, but wraps the URL call into a function. I still plan on adding the option to get a string returned rather than to have the function generate the output (makes it easier to retrofit existing PHP code) , but basically you take the main function and build a wrapper function that already defines the base URL and skin and such as well as how you want the help link to appear (as custom text or ? or button).