Sep 28, 2006 Little Helper, the interactive help system
for Headlight is now live and
almost finished. It is build much like a Wiki so Headlight users can contribute and
ask questions. I like to call it a good mix of a blog and an article base, because
it works like a blog but without the chronology. The whole thing will be available
for free download sometime in the near future.
The vision
We envisioned a community driven help system where people actively participated to
create a better and more complete knowledge base. The application had to use best
practices from Web 2.0 and .NET.
The technique
Little Helper is build entirely in C# and ASP.NET 2.0 after the principle of KISS.
Everything is kept in a single Visual Studio website with no included class libraries, so it’s very easy to approach, extend and maintain. All the posts and comments are
kept in XML files, so no database is needed. To summarize: it is plug n’ play.
Feature list
ASP.NET
- URL rewriting
- HTTP
compression (HttpModule)
- Whitespace removal (HttpModule)
- ASP.NET 2.0 native themes support
- Intelligent caching
- Breadcrumb
- Onsite search engine
- Unlimited number of posts
- Unlimited number of post sublevels (see the menu)
- Multi language support
Web 2.0
Standards
Near future features
-
Social bookmarking support (Digg, del.icio.us etc.) -
Done
-
Accesskey attribute for the menu - Done
- Web service endpoints
- Trackback and pingback support
- Ping Technorati, PubSub etc.
- Post organizer (drag n’ drop AJAX stuff)
- Implement site configuration page
- Google
Sitemap
-
Multi user support - Done
- Custom plug-in support
Stuff to improve
-
Better search algorithm - Done
-
Use ASP.NET
2.0 membership provider - Done
-
Use ASP.NET 2.0 profiles for user storage - Dismissed
-
Move all strings to resource files - Done
- More microformats
It’s quite a big feature list, but as you can see, we still have things to do before
we are completely done with the first version.
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