Faq-O-Matic Faq-O-Matic: It's Not Just for FAQs Anymore.

	Faq-O-Matic Faq-O-Matic : Administrators' Guide : Customize : It's Not Just for FAQs Anymore.
	Jonh, can you change FAQ-O-Matic so that it does away with the relation to FAQ. Instead, advertise it as a hierachical note system? FAQ-O-Matic as is now is essentially a web-based hierachical note system. It's name is too narrow. The association with Questions and Answer is confusing for those who use it other than just (public-contribution based) FAQ. This shouldn't be difficult to change. Specifically, change all the text/links wordings in the display so that it no longer associates with Questions and Answer. Instead, focus on the hierachical nature. Say, using directories and texts as mneumonics. People who use faq-o-matic for faq purposes can benefit from the change too because they get to set their own structure of the FAQ with their own wordings. Xah xah@best.com http://www.best.com/~xah/PageTwo_dir/more.html
	We have elsewhere mentioned that this tool is bigger than you imagine. You've obviously built it on a database which can keep track of data objects and relationships as they are rearranged in a structure. You've built in support for HTML, from a stylistic point of view I think, but I'm already using that feature to try to overcome my sysadmin's totalitarian install decisions. I recall a statement our director made a couple of months ago about our new website: "After all, it's only a database, right? Everything's a database." The recollection got me to wondering how far you are from having a "website database kit." I probably won't explain this well, but my notion is that, much like VHDL programming permits computer designers to "program" the design of a new CPU without once drawing a circuit diagram, F-o-M may be close to offering web designers the capability to "spec" web sites by filling in a database. David Nelson
	I sort of hinted in Faq-O-Matic Faq-O-Matic that the FAQ-O-Matic system could be used for other purposes (help desks, documentation). I feel that replacing the phrasing ("questions," "answers") with something more vague would make it more difficult for newcomers to use. Luckily, if the phrasing is wrong for your particular application, you can use the internationalization support to write "English-to-English" translations to change the phrases into ones that make sense for you. If your translation is particularly generic, send it in as a patch, and I'll include it in the distribution.
	I recommend to consider it as a knowledge base rather than a database. It is a semantic network. Nodes can have notes. A notes can have an attachment. At this version an attachment could be only as a uploaded file. But it is not a big work to add more attachment types to the note attachment page (it is called upload page now) with appropriate backend supporting scripts: reference links (UI: to choose from the list), notification subscription (UI: email address or link to a user account; backend: to send email about node updates), alert (UI: to choose the date and time; backend: to send a message to all subscibers at alert time), user account (UI: contact form; backend: LDAP link), task (UI: assignment form), publish-request (UI: upload form; backend: verify and propogate content from the stage area to the production one). New "note" types and "group" types may drammatically extend areas to apply FAQ-O-Matic: user account management, project management, issue tracking, web content management. All needed is the way to create new types of notes and groups by deploying type's UI form and backend scripts.
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