Windows Developer Power Tools

7.5 Building a FAQ with skmFAQs

Maintaining and supporting any software system inevitably involves answering the same basic questions over and over and over and . . . . Ergo, create a Frequently Asked Questions document and put those common issues out in the open so your users can browse through and (hopefully) answer their own questions.

FAQs are an invaluable concept, but creating and maintaining them can require a hefty bit of time. You could use a Wiki, but that would mean opening up your FAQ to anyone who cares to edit the document. You’d risk ending up with incorrect answers to questions, not to mention opening up your site for spam advertising of diet pills or various aids for your users’ sex lives. What you need is a way to allow only trusted users to create and edit FAQ entries.

Scott Mitchell, renowned ASP.NET guru, created skmFAQs to give you a way to control who’s able to enter and edit your FAQ entries. skmFAQs lets you set up very granular access control for entries, and it has a great set of features for organizing your FAQ content.

skmFAQs at a Glance
Tool	skmFAQs
Version covered	Beta 1
Home page	http://www.skmfaqs.com
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/158
Summary	Framework and sample web site enabling you to build a user-controlled FAQ system
License type	Attribution 1.0 (Creative Commons)
Online resources	MSDN article (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnaspp/html/skmfaqs.asp ...