Internet knowledgebase with PHP
by Chetan Gadgil
A knowledgebase where customers of a company can find answers to questions they have about
its various products is very valuable. Here, customers can have their issues addressed by the
support group and also share their experiences with other customers. The usefulness of a good
knowledgebase is not just limited to external customers. Even within a company different teams
can use it to interact more effectively.
A web based information base is ideal due to many reasons:
1. Many users can access it simultaneously with just a browser.
2. Different users can be assigned different "roles" and different access privileges. E.g. A
"customer" role can ask questions or comment on an existing answer. A "customer care
engineer" can reply to questions, delete irrelevant questions. The knowledgebase can be
configured to have various views, which would deliver only that content which the user is
interested in.
A good knowledgebase should be easily searchable for needed information. It should possibly
provide information about as many products as possible. Certain users should be able to generate
reports based on what products have more queries. It can thus be a good source for data-mining
about customer and product related information. A knowledgebase can span multiple companies
and their products.
The information can be very easily processed by external tools if it is stored in a database. A
relational database would provide the necessary performance and ease of use. One good relational
database on Linux is MySQL. PHP has built-in support to talk to several databases including
Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Postgres. You can also talk to any other database through ODBC.
A good way to implement such a knowledgebase would be through the use of server side
scripting. Due to the excellent stability, scalability and extensibility characteristics, the Linux-
Apache-PHP combination is a good candidate. PHP is a server side scripting module for the
Apache web-server. It is meant as a HTML embedded scripting language. The language syntax
is similar to that of PERL and Java. Like any server side scripting language it allows rapid
development of dynamically generated web pages. PHP can be downloaded from
http://www.php.net. It is opensource software.
Getting started with PHP-Linux.
First compile PHP and Apache together. Follow the instructions in the php-.../INSTALL file.
Make sure that before you compile you have the "GD" library (for creating GIF images on the
fly) installed. You should also install MySQL (download from http://www.mysql.com) and the
development headers for MySQL before you compile PHP. Make the necessary changes to your
Apcahe - http.conf and start it.
Once your Apache installation is up and running, try a simple PHP example:
test php
test php
Chetan
Gadgil (Home-Linux)
Hello.php3
Load this page in your browser through your Apache web server. You must have observed that
the "Hello, World!" message is evaluated when the page is delivered by the Web server to your
browser. There are many ways of embedding PHP code into your HTML pages.
OR
OR ASP-style