Congratulations! You have just downloaded a help system that has many features of some very expensive help systems. Although this system is not designed so that any dang fool can set it up, I think that you will find that for a web guy, this thing is as easy as pie to configure and add content. So if you are a dang fool, you will have to pay the big buck to someone else, but if you are a web guy (of almost any caliber), today is your lucky day!
Requirements: A LAMP server. This program uses PHP, so you will need an Apache server running PHP. The Sphider™ search engine will need a MySQL database. You will need to download your copy of Sphider™ from http://www.sphider.eu/ and read their manuals for the Sphider™ installation. There is one small modification you will need to make to Sphider™ which I will describe later.
File Locations: You can put this help system in any publicly-accessible folder on a web server or even at web root. By default, it expects Sphider™ to be installed in /sphider. Put your HTML help pages right in the same folder as this page (if you prefer to just reference them by file name only).
Adding Help Topic Pages to Help System: There is only one file that needs to be modified to add your help topics to the system. The file is toc.html. Edit this page in code view in an HTML editor or a text editor. The contents of the stock toc.html page looks like this:
Simply replace the href with your help topic page, and change the text to say what you want it to say. Be sure to name your help topic pages with a .html extension. You will also need to ensure that each id is unique and sequential. The value of num_items must match the highest number of your topic link ids. The id is used by the forward and backward buttons in the tool bar of this help system.
Setting Up Context-Sensitive Links for Help Buttons: This system translates references to anchors in the URL into the name of the help topic page. So to go to topic1.html, the URL to your help button would look like: http://websitewherehelpis.com/folderwherehelpis/help.html#topic1. Note: Do not include .html as that is automatically assumed.
If you want to go to a specific location on the help topic page as with traditional anchors, you can do that too. Simply put an anchor in your help topic page as is typicall done. To reference the anchored location in your help topic, add an additional anchor ref after the first page-reference anchor. The URL to your help button then becomes http://websitewherehelpis.com/folderwherehelpis/help.html#topic1#anchor1
Sphider™ Modification: Sphider™ is designed to display the page found by a search result link in the same frame as that link. But since this system runs the Sphider™ link from the left navigation and we want the content to show up in the main frame, the target for the Sphider™ links needs to be changed. Edit /sphider/templates/standard/search_results.html and look for the line that reads :
<a href="<?php print $url?>" class="title"> <?php print ($title?$title:$sph_messages['Untitled'])?></a><br/>
at around line 75 and chang it to:
<a href="<?php print $url?>" class="title" target="mainFrame"> <?php print ($title?$title:$sph_messages['Untitled'])?></a><br/>
In a nutshell, that is it. Bon appetit!