Wikis and Robohelp - Any experience

Report · Jan 22, 2010

RH8 HTML.

Well I'm not surprised that this has come to me now, there is an existing Wiki setup where I work, accessed and used by staff only. They would like me to re-furbish the whole thing.

Im just wondering if a) anyone here has integrated a Wiki with RH, I know how a Wiki works, so I'm not expecting really that it could be maintained through RH, but perhaps embed it within the Topic pane of a Webhelp project or something similar, so that a RH project, and Wiki are accessible from within the same

b) some decent Wiki software (freeware?) that is rather useful that others have used previously....

any hints, insight really would be useful.

Report · Jan 22, 2010

Hi Nick

Seems I once saw some sort of "RoboHelp to Wiki" software bandied about here at one point. Perhaps we can search for that thread.

Until we can resurrect that thread, are you familiar with the concept of an Inline Frame? (IFRAME)

IFRAMEs allow you to define an area inside a topic that displays another HTML page inside it. Similar to Picture In Picture on a television set where you are viewing two channels at the same time.

My thought here is that perhaps you could have your static RoboHelp pages that have IFRAMEs in the pages that point to the Wiki pages. Certainly there would be maintenance involved, from the standpoint of periodically updating the TOC and Index and such, but it would seem this is feasible.

Cheers... Rick

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Report · Jan 22, 2010

There's a demo of how the iFrames to which Rick refers at http://www.grainge.org/pages/authoring/rh_tour/index.htm

See www.grainge.org for RoboHelp and Authoring tips

Follow me @petergrainge

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Report · Jan 22, 2010

Thanks guys, yeah I'm aware oif iframes, and using them.

I was more looking for any solution of creating the wiki in RH, or linking it into my existing project. dont think the 2 will work at all. Best I can hope for is either to iframe it, or link to it.

Never mind, thanks.

Report · Jan 22, 2010

Hi,

It might be easier to create a frameset to call the wiki in your RH skin. A single frame that calls the wiki. You won't have to play around fitting Iframes.

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Report · Jan 23, 2010

Hi all

For anyone like me that is a bit puzzled with Willam's suggestion, I'll add this.

After reading the suggestion, the following question popped into my twisted little mind.

What's the difference between the IFRAME bit I suggested and what Willam offered?

It took a bit of pondering and I finally came to my senses. When you use an Inline Frame, you are creating that "Picture in Picture" effect. When you create a single frame frameset, you are essentially creating an HTML page that for all intents and purposes behaves like an IFRAME in the respect that it dispays one HTML page inside another, but my guess is that it is similar to tuning to channel 77 on your television set and while viewing channel 77, you are actually viewing the content of channel 69.

I have to admit that I've never had an occasion to use a single frame frameset. The thought causes dissonance in my fried little brain as I observe that a frameset implies more than a single frame contained within a set. And why would anyone want that when you could simply point at a topic?

My hat's off big time to Willam for the wonderful suggestion. It would seem to be just what is needed for something like this and it will be something I'll remember. Hey, you taught an old dog a new trick! I LOVE when that happens. So TendJewBerryMud!

In case you wondered how this is done, the code for a single frame frameset would look like this:

<html>
<frameset rows="100%,*">
<frame src="Path_And_File_Name_To_Wiki_Page.htm">
</frameset>
</html>

This approach would be cleaner, because using my IFRAME suggestion, you would need to create a topic in RoboHelp, then muck about with inserting the IFRAME code and tweaking it. In the case of the single frame frameset, you would just create the frameset page and be done with it.