WebHelp with Feedback is a form of online help system that consists of a series of web pages (XHTML format). Its advantages include platform independence, continuous content update, and a feedback mechanism that allows your authors and audience to interact with one another.
Layout
The layout of the feedback-enabled WebHelp system resembles the layout of the basic WebHelp
and the left section is the same. However, the bottom of the right section contains a
comments bar. Select Log in from this bar to
authenticate as a user for the WebHelp system. If you do not have a user name, complete the
fields in the dialog box to create a user. Under the comments bar, you
can click the Add New Comment button to add a comment, regardless of
whether or not you are logged in.
Note: You can enhance the appearance of the selected item in the Table
of Contents. See the Customizing WebHelp chapter for more details.
After you log in, your name and user name are displayed in the
Comments bar together with the Log of and
Edit buttons. Click the Edit button to open
the User Profile dialog. In this dialog you can customize the following
options:
- Your Name - you can use this field to edit the initial name that you used to create your user profile.
- Your e-mail address - you can use this field to edit the initial e-mail address that you used to create your profile.
- When to receive an e-mail:
- When a comment is left on a page that you commented on.
- When a comment is left on any topic in the Help system.
- When a reply is left to one of my comments.
- New Password - allows you to enter a new password for your user
account.Note: The Current Password field from the top of the User Profile is mandatory in case you want to save the changes you make.
Search Tab
The Search tab is enhanced with a rating
mechanism that computes scores for every page that matches the search criteria. These scores
are then translated into a 5-star rating scheme. The search results are sorted depending on
the following:
- The number of keywords found in a single page (the higher the number, the better).
- The context (for example, a word found in a title scores better than a word found in
unformatted text). The search ranking order, sorted by relevance is as follows:
- The search phrase is included in a meta keyword
- The search phrase is in the title of the page
- The search phrase is in bold text in a paragraph
- The search phrase is in normal text in a paragraph
Rules that are applied during a search include:
- The space character separates keywords (an expression such as grow flowers counts as two separate keywords: grow and flowers).
- Do not use quotes to perform an exact search for multiple word expressions (an expression such as "grow flowers", returns no results since it searches for two separate words).
- indexterm and keywords DITA elements are an effective way to increase the ranking of a page (for example, content inside keywords elements weighs twice as much as content inside an H1 HTML element).
- Words composed by merging two or more words with colon (":"), minus ("-"), underline ("_"), or dot (".") characters count as a single word.
- Always search for words containing three or more characters (shorter words, such as to or of are ignored). This rule does not apply to CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages.