Family Historian User Group

The new Knowledge Base platform is now ready for migration to start (apart, of course, for the bugs that you eagle-eyed lot will find). Many thanks to Valkrider (Colin) for doing much of the technical heavy lifting (he's much more familiar with WordPress than I am, and doesn't complain at all when I say 'but it would be better if we could just...')

We've focused on making it easy to find content, and to do this, consulted best practice guidelines for a load of Knowledge Bases across the Internet.

The interface is deliberately uncluttered and uncomplicated -- you find the content you want by one of two methods:

1. Structured browsing by content type and category/sub-category.
2. A single Search box that works consistently everywhere, and will search the content as written (filtered by content type if you wish) plus category terms and any additional search terms assigned by the article's author to make a piece of content more 'discoverable'. (My perennial example: there will be an article about restoring data from a backup, but it will also have the search term 'recover' because not everybody reaches for the same word for the same thing).

Editing is more straightforward than the old KB as well. For those people who don't want to do more than submit their website, or a download, or recommend a service or utility, they can fill in a simple form (without registering for an account, but quoting their FHUG account details) and after spam-checking and review by an administrator, the content will be published. For people who want to do more complex editing, once they've applied for an editor's account, it's basically standard WordPress editing with some FH specific customisations to make life easier and some simplifications to enforce consistency.

Take a look: New Knowledge Base.

Note: some of the content is test content or has been migrated by a script and needs 'reviewing/sorting out' during the migration process; other content is in the process of being migrated article by article.

There's a style guide in place that addresses formatting and layout (based on best practice for readability), to keep everything looking consistent, but we haven't made any assumptions about the types of articles we will eventually end up with (as we started discussing at Towards a style guide for the new Knowledgebase (17458).)

Our preference is that we focus on migrating existing content first (improving the quality and discoverability if necessary as we go) in parallel with a continued discussion about the types of new content we want to add. Ideally, we'll get all existing content over before FH7 hits, so we only have to make changes in one KB for FH7. Once existing content is across (or discarded), work can start on adding new content (How-To Guides etc.)

We have resources set up for migration: there's an article on how to do it and anyone who applies for an editor's account during the migration period will be given access to the relevant Trello boards (used for tracking migration activity) and a closed mailing list to discuss migration issues (so as not to clutter up the FHUG forums with stuff that's meaningless to most people).

A couple of migration notes: We're going to leave Plugin Help pages where they are in the old KB because of their specific formatting requirements -- they will continue to work as long as needed; and Ancestral Sources documentation will be handled as a separate migration project once the main migration is complete.

So... please volunteer to help the migration and sign up for an editor's account -- the more volunteers we get the faster it will go. Even if you only do one article or a few of the simpler content types, it will really help!

A fantastic acheivement, and a huge improvement.
Well done all

Alyn

It will be even better when all the content is migrated but thank you on behalf of Jane, Colin and I.

Thanks to those of you who have volunteered to help with the migration so far -- more volunteers are always welcome!

We'd be grateful if changes to the current KB could be kept to a minimum -- we're not freezing it because some changes are obviously necessary, and content that isn't currently planned to be migrated will need to be updated by the authors.

We're still looking at how we can make it possible to migrate plugin help so watch this space.

Apologies if I missed something, and please excuse my curiosity, but why do we need a new New Knowledgebase, some technical reason perhaps, outdated software, or a new super platform?

jimlad68 wrote: ↑01 Jun 2020 20:25 Apologies if I missed something......

You must have missed some very protracted discussions back in February, Jim:
Improving Accessibility of Commonly Requested Help (17443)
and
What is the purpose of the FHUG Knowledgebase? (17450)
and
Towards a style guide for the new Knowledgebase (17458)

Many thanks to Helen and Colin for their work on this. I don't think I'd be much use as a volunteer because it would be a very steep learning curve but I do appreciate what's being done.

thanks lorna, I will check them out

I can see from the contents page (still incomplete) that this is going to be far easier to navigate for forgetful old people like me.
I was trying to find out yesterday whether one could put death of a parent into the All tab of the property box. I gather that one cant (it is only the death of a spouse)
But as the answer was a negative, that took a long time to not find something.

I'm glad it looks promising. I'm hoping to make some changes to the search feature on the new KB which will make it even more usable when it's complete.

It is easy to show on the All tab the Death or any other fact of any close relative: Spouse, Father, Mother, Sibling.
Just a matter of expanding the Spouse family or Parents family links and then expanding the Individual records.

Impressive, the new KB; great job!

@JoopvB ~ Sorry, but I have removed your second comment as it infringes the beta testing Ts&Cs.
That also explains why what you requested is not in the new KB yet.

JoopvB, We will very be taking the NEW KB offline in the next couple of days for maintenance, which means it won't be readable for anyone without an editor's account for it. I plan to make it available again when FH7 is released... who knows what might appear in there while it's offline?