I'm looking for a better way to maintain my tutorials and ensure they are easy to read/follow which can present complex steps in an easy-to-grasp manner from an organizational manner. Suggestions would be appreciated.
I currently use phpBB bulletin board software and requires breaking a tutorial into multiple posts/replies, does not allow easy organization (e.g. collapsible sections). The benefit however is that I can easily copy/paste a tutorial to this site with minimal changes in format.
For internal access only, I tend to prefer wiki sites but it can be a bit off-putting to others that don't know wiki code. The rigid rules around title names are enough to scare off potential contributors.
Here are some features I'm looking for:
- Web-based, browser agnostic and work well on desktop or mobile.
- Ability to self-host the system and not rely on 3rd party.
- Collapsible sections to hide content that may not need to be read. Example
- Ability to use text, images and video (local or external such as YouTube, imgur).
- Ability for end-users to view changes over time (like wiki history comparisons)
- Ability to use templates to help with maintaining consistent design (but not require it)
- Ability to organize just a few tutorials or thousands of them and the version-specific variants over time.
- Ability to get feedback even from anonymous users such as view totals, thumbs up votes, comments, etc.
- Allow tutorial status to stated explicitly and potentially hide tutorials (or make harder to find) based on status. (e.g. in progress, finished, out-dated)
- Permission management to ensure some articles are protected from change.
- Does not require a PhD to use and allow editing later to be "cleaned up" if it was sloppy or incorrectly organized, titled, etc.
- As a bonus, would be awesome if a tutorial could be "exported" into standard formats such as .PDF, .ODT, .DOCX, etc.
- As a bonus, having certain content locked behind a wall would also be great for company Intranet areas, etc.
Wiki sites tend to be wide-open where people can register and make changes everywhere (which might not be a good thing for maintaining quality).
Any web app that allows registration tends to get slammed with spambot registrations which is why I disable registration on my forum (or enable it with manual approval)...so if there is to be public registration, it needs a good mechanism (that changes over time) to prevent spambots.
The ubuntu.com/tutorials site has no datestamp per article making it difficult to determine relevancy or if edited recently or what changed. Organization seems limited to a single category. Search will include links outside of the tutorial area. The ToC on the left is great and even better to see the entire tutorial on a single page if you click the "Suggest changes" link...which makes it possible to export as a single file (e.g. print to pdf).
Thanks,
LHammonds