68KB

We would like to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season and we wish you the best of luck in 2008.

68 Designs will be closed from December 23rd till January 7th. Even though we will be officially closed we will still try and answer emails and support requests.

This is a quick announcement to let you know we finished a Kayako knowledge base import yesterday. I have been researching other knowledge base systems that also offer exporting so we can create modules for them as well. So if you have any you would like to recommend now is a great time. Just comment below and let us know the system you currently use.

We have just finished up setting up a live demo of 68KB and you can now see it in action. Please remember this is the first preview and some bugs and issues will probably be seen. Also not all of the features have been added in yet but they will be added in after they are completed.

On a side note we have setup our knowledge base with a custom theme to match our website and few extra added features. This will hopefully show you what can be achieved.

This is just a heads to let you know tomorrow our first newsletter will be going out.  If you haven’t subscribed yet you still have some time to subscribe.

This first issue will have information on testing out the live demo and this will only be available through the newsletter.  So hurry and subscribe now.

One of the things that is high on my feature list is the ability for outside people to extend the system without touching any of the core files. I am jumping for joy to say that this portion of the script was finished up today. In the rest of this post I will try and shed some light on the advantages of a system like this and some insight in how we accomplished it.

Less Bloat

By keeping the core lean and mean it makes bug tracking easy and keeps the administration trimmed down to what you actually use. What good is a product with millions of options if you only use a couple?

Easier Upgrades

If you do not have to touch the core script to add a feature then upgrading should be painless. No need to worry about every little change you made and document it. Of course if you think it is easier to not use the module the system and hack your site anyway then this will not be the case but that is why we are spending so much time building it this way.

No Waiting

With a module system you do not have to wait on a feature to be released. You have the power to add it in any time you want.

How it works

The module system was fairly complex to setup and I had to create a custom library to interact with the “module hooks” and a custom view file that loads a file from the module directory. The hooks are called through out the script like this:

$this->kb_hooks->call_hook('article_edit', $arr);

Which in turn call a module with the function “modulename_article_edit”.

Wrap Up

I am sure you can probably tell from the benefits listed above that I am excited about this module system and I think you will to once you get a chance to give a test drive. At a later date I will be writing a tutorial on how to code a module and be more in depth on how the backend works.