This is the first chapter of Knowledgebase Manager Pro User Guide. This chapter gives an overview of how Knowledgebase Manager Pro (KMP) works.
Articles
Articles are your knowledge base's main content portion. They contain the information that your users see. Whenever you want to add new information to your knowledge base, create an article containing the information or update an existing article.
Each article has its own page in your knowledge base, which can hold text, images, video, animation and other kinds of data. Users can find articles in a variety of ways: from the knowledge base's front page, from a category page, or by searching.
In most implementations, a knowledge base article is similar to an encyclopedia entry. Ideally, it contains all the relevant, available information on a specific topic. However, you can modify the role of the article in KMP depending upon the purpose of your knowledge base. By allowing user comments and user-submitted questions, and setting up groups of users with different privileges, you can develop a knowledge base that also shares the characteristics of a community forum, blog, or news source.
You can restrict article availability. KMP allows you to make an article visible only to certain groups of users.
Categories
Categories group articles. Each of your knowledge base's articles must belong to at least one category. A list of categories displays on your knowledge base's front page. When a user clicks a category link, a page displays listing all the articles in the category.
As well as helping arrange your knowledge base's articles in a user-friendly way, you can also use categories to restrict article availability. KMP allows you to make a category visible and editable only by certain groups of users.
Users
Users are the people who view your knowledge base, provide feedback, and make administrative decisions and changes.
The degree to which users can make changes to your knowledge base depends on their access privileges. At one end of the scale, a user may be able to read only certain articles and make no changes, whereas at the other end of the scale the superuser ("admin") can change everything about the knowledge base. Somewhere in between, a trusted user may be able to read, comment on, write and edit articles - but nothing else.
Groups
User groups define the access privileges of the users that belong to them. You can configure the types of action that members of each group can take, as well as the article categories that they can view and edit.
Custom Templates
"Templates" is a collective term for a large number of objects that control every aspect of your knowledge base's appearance and functionality.
Your knowledge base's templates are completely configurable. You can create a custom template by copying one of the basic themes included with KMP, then edit the code (HTML and CSS) of each template as required.
Feedback
Feedback allows your knowledge base's users to interact with the knowledge base, article authors, and one another. Users can provide feedback via comments (short pieces of text, added to the relevant article page), ratings (votes on whether or not an article was helpful and notes for article improvement), ask questions (get suggestions while typing a question, send it to KMP, and forward to specified users and emails).
Subscriptions
Wherever you see the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) logo (in your knowledge base, users can click the logo to subscribe to an RSS feed for the relevant section.
Also, user can subscribe to an article or category and get notified by email about updates (new articles, updated articles, or new comments - by his choice).
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