[rt-announce] RTFM 2.0 Beta 1 now available

[Jesse Vincent]

RTFM (The RT FAQ Manager) is a tool for maintaining an organizational
knowledgebase. Out of the box, it integrates with RT3 (Also available from
bestpractical.com). 

Installation instructions:

0) Download from http://bestpractical.com/pub/rt/devel/rtfm-2-0-beta-1.tar.gz 

1) Install RT 3.0.x [or 2.1.8x for the moment ] 

2) Once RT 3.0 appears to be happily installed, cd into the directory you
   unpacked RTFM into.

3) Edit RTFM's Makefile to point to your RT 3 instance

4) make sure that mysql or pgsql's commandline tool is in your path

5) Type "make install"

6) stop and start your web server

Staff users should be now have a new "RTFM" menu item RT's top level menu.
As an administrator, you should go create some "Classes" of articles in RTFM.
Classes are equivalent to RT's queues. Unlike RTFM 1.0, RTFM 2.0 doesn't have a
single "body" section for each article. Everything is a custom field (except
for name, summary and some other basic metadata). So, you need to go create
some custom fields. You've got five choices. "SelectSingle" and
"SelectMultiple" let you pick one or many choices from a list respectively.
"FreeformSingle" and "FreeformMultiple" let you hand-enter one or many lines of
text. "TextSingle" is what you want for the "Body" of articles. Once you've
created your custom fields, go into your classes and click on "Custom Fields"
and add the Custom Fields you want to each class.

Grant some ACLs to your users and start creating articles.


Of course, RTFM integrates with RT.  You can extract the body of a ticket into
an article. Within RT, you should now see an "Extract to article" button in
the upper right hand corner of RT's UI when working with tickets. When you
click that button, RTFM will ask you which Class to create your new article in. 
Once you click on a class name, the Ticket's transactions will be displayed,
along with a set of select boxes. For each transaction, you can pick which
TextSingle that transaction should be extracted to. From there on in, it's just
regular article creation.  And the integration doesn't stop there! When
replying to or commenting on tickets, there's a new UI widget that lets you
search for and include RTFM articles in your reply. (They're editable, of
course).

Development of RTFM 2.0 has been sponsored by RIPE NCC and DynDNS.org

You probably want to discuss rtfm on rt-devel at lists.fsck.com at this point. 
(Send mail to rt-devel-request at lists.fsck.com to subscribe)

        Best,
        Jesse Vincent
        Best Practical Solutions, LLC

-- 
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt  -- Trouble Ticketing. Free.