Knowledge-Base content, request for ideas

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tonid
Posts: 5
Joined: Fri Mar 17, 2017 12:54 am

Knowledge-Base content, request for ideas

Post by tonid »

Hello. I've been writing and managing documentation for a cybersecurity product for more than 2 years now using DITA and Oxygen to publish on the web for our customers, it's integrated with DocsBot AI, searchable by Google, and works perfectly!

However, there is also a Salesforce Knowledge Base that often duplicates my content and is not fully managed by me. What I want to do is create a "Knowledge Base" section in the well-ordered, hierarchical DITA (exported to WebHelp) content and it's giving me a headache how to approach this.

I could simply create a topic and every new KB article would be a sub-topic, but that would create a huge, useless list in the menu (I use the left-hand menu export for WebHelp). While it would of course still work by using the search and DocsBot, I wonder how to present it better, for example, by creating a menu subdivided by general topics in the right-hand pane as "squares" instead of putting it in the left-hand menu.

I was thinking of creating topic as toc=no in the DITAmap and simply linking to them from a "central topic" that would be exported to the right-hand side pane, for example, using a table or simpletable. This, however, creates a challenge in DITA itself because if I put the topic in the DITAmap as toc=no, then the topic is displayed without the left-hand side menu, which is not ideal.

If anyone has any ideas on how to approach it, i.e. how to include "less-organized content" into "well-organized content", it would be very much appreciated. Worse off, I'll just create a regular section in the DITAmap and the menu with several subsections on different topics...