Templates or Knowledge Base?

[zephquamy]

We have been using Cerberus 3 for several months now and have just made the plunge into Cerberus 4.

In Cerberus 3 we used the Knowledge Base + Tags to keep a list of responses we could quickly pull up and paste into an email for common questions.

I had assumed we would do the same thing in Cerberus 4, but the search feature in fetch and retrieve doesn't pull in the whole article, meaning extra clicks to open the page, select and copy the text, and then paste it into the email.

Basically we need a fast way to get at our canned responses for frequently asked questions. How are you guys doing it? Do you put your canned responses in your email templates? If so, how do you search them? Surely you don't just browse.

Alternatively is there a way to increase the amount of text that shows up in the Fetch and Retrieve Preview so that we could continue to copy/paste from that menu? Thanks for your responses.

[jstanden]

Hi zephquamy!

Basically we need a fast way to get at our canned responses for frequently asked questions. How are you guys doing it? Do you put your canned responses in your email templates? If so, how do you search them? Surely you don't just browse.

We send the direct link to the knowledgebase in the response instead of copying the contents. That also introduces people to the knowledgebase and cuts down on the FAQs in future support.

Sometimes we'll also send a link to the KB search page if a question is general enough. For example: http://www.cerberusweb.com/kb/search/masks

You can add any keywords after /search/

Alternatively is there a way to increase the amount of text that shows up in the Fetch and Retrieve Preview so that we could continue to copy/paste from that menu? Thanks for your responses.

Sure, the easiest thing would just be editing the following template:
/cerb4/plugins/cerberusweb.core/templates/display/modules/fnr/results.tpl.php

You'll see a line like:
{assign var=description value=$item->description()}

You should be able to change this to:
{assign var=description value=$item->content()}

That should display the whole item content from the RSS feed (returned by F&R) opposed to the truncated summary/description.

But, really, I'd suggest you just send people direct links to your KB/forums/blog/etc when using F&R.

[zephquamy]

Right now our knowledge base isn't open to the outside world. So I'll probably go with your suggestion for editing the fetch and retrieve. Thanks for the help!

[jstanden]

Sure thing!

You can also just instance two knowledgebases so your internal one is password protected or on the intranet, and the public one doesn't have anything personal in it.

[zephquamy]

I changed
{assign var=description value=$item->description()}

to read

{assign var=description value=$item->content()}

now I get nothing but a link to the knowledge base article when I expand the article in F&R

[zephquamy]

ok, this is working now. I had to change
/cerb4/libs/devblocks/libs/ZendFramework/Zend/Feed/Rss.php

it was listing content:encoded
I changed it to content and it displays the way I want it now.

[jstanden]

Excellent! Thanks for the follow-up. :)

Several people have brought this up lately and I've sent them to this thread.