KnowledgeBuilder 3 has been released. If you haven’t heard what’s new, go ahead and review the list of new features.

I’ll touch on some of the interesting ones here.

Let’s face it. It’s hard to get excited about knowledge base software. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be made into an intelligent, well-designed product. KnowledgeBuilder is just that. The front-end includes a major facelift, and the back-end has been completely re-written for much easier extensibility and ease of maintenance. Not to mention - more control for you, the user.

Themes

Right out of the box, you can customize KB to your liking. We prefer our subtle design (and have spent many hours adjusting the CSS), but we understand that it’s impertive users can change the design to fit their organization’s scheme. Changing the theme of your KB is as simple as creating and maintaining a CSS file.

Interface

Regardless of what styles you use, you can be certain your KB interface will behave in effective ways. KB 3 uses Ajax in many areas, in order to create more usable, flexible interfaces. Ajax allows for live-editing, drag-and-drop, and extremely subtle content processing, to name a few. That means a more fluid experience for you.

Search engines

As well as a better experience for users, we’ve also allowed search engines a better avenue to your KB content. Search-friendly URL’s allow your content to be indexed in a more effective manner.

Exporting

We like to think KnowledgeBuilder helps you organize content in effective ways. However, we know sometimes users want to organize it in their own way (like with custom CSS), and this is why we made exporting an important objective for version 3. Included is enhanced PDF export support, as well as export to HTML. Also, you can use the new RSS feeds to aggregate and organize your KB content in your own feed readers.

Importing

Speaking of export, how about import? You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to bulk import articles into KB. You can also do this for Glossary and Word Index terms.

User controls

You’ll enjoy more fine-tuned user control in KB 3. Creating user groups lets you designate privileges as a whole, or to each individual. This provides a much deeper application, which can handle many users while still maintaining the sensitivity of the articles.

It has been a while since the last major update of KnowledgeBuilder. For the last couple of months we have been working on a major update.  A core part of this update is a complete rewrite of KnowledgeBuilder’s backend.

We’ve optimized the database to handle much more data with greater speed, no more slow pages when there are a lot of articles and/or categories. Speaking of articles and categories, icons and tags can now be added as well as SEO urls: all categories and articles will have “search friendly” URLS that include article/category titles.

KnowledgeBuilder will include better management features including simplified importing and syncing as well as improved content management. Ajax enabled features will eliminate the need to reload pages for minor actions, meaning increased page optimization and usability.

The admin side of KnowledgeBuilder is almost done and we’re working to catch up on the public end. A major new feature on the public side is live edit, you can double click the article title/content (or category’s title/description) and edit it right there!

Signup for the beta

Having previously been a programmer myself, I can attest to very real and maddening phenomenon that affects nearly everyone in this line of work: the urge to rewrite. It comes on hard and fast, usually immediately after finishing a piece of software. Sometimes it even comes on smack in the middle of your efforts.

The reason is simple: as you go through the process of writing the code, you gain new perspectives on the shortcomings of your original approach to the problem. It’s the same thing that happens when we look back on the events of our past and think “if I only knew then what I know now…” In a way, the better the software that you’ve written turned out, the better your perspective becomes, and therefore the more pernicious the urge to rewrite it becomes.

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A number of users have been experiencing increased spam issues with KB and comments.

We just released a minor update that will assist with combatting comment spam.  You can turn this on in the settings page for KB.

We recently released KB 2.61 which has a couple of minor bug fixes along with a quite handy new feature.

When you click on “Articles” you will now see a new option in the sub menu entitled “DB Sync”

For those familiar with the 1-2-All add-on (Db Sync) you will find this feature quite similar. This feature allows you to connect to any external MySQL database and fetch your articles to synchronize with KnowledgeBuilder. You can setup arguments and rules for which rows from your external database to fetch and there are a variety of sync options.

Below you will find some screenshots of this feature in action. Should you have any questions just let us know.

We have just released a new version of KnowledgeBuilder!

We have added a couple of very important bug fixes.

And after a longer period of time, we have added a new feature called “Index”.

Feature works like this:
Now you can add words into “Index” feature the same way you are adding Terms to Glossary Terms. The difference is that words in Index do not have descriptions and headers (titles). They are used to search for all occurences of that word in your KB. Usefull option!

We have also added a support for using double quotes in category names. Actualy, we have fixed a couple of areas that prevented that from working all the time. Might come in handy…

If you are upgrading from version 2.60.21, you will have to reupload the following files:

• admin/KBAdminContext.class.php
• admin/KBAdminContextSwitch.class.php
• admin/KBAdminIndexesEditContext.class.php
• admin/KBAdminIndexesManageContext.class.php
• admin/KBAdminUserManagerContext.class.php
• admin/main.php
• admin/sql/install_2.60.sql
• admin/sql/install_database.php
• admin/sql/update_database.php
• admin/sql/upgrade_2_60_22.sql
• admin/templates/indexes_edit.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/indexes_manage.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/main.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/nav_top.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/terms_edit.tpl.htm
• admin/templates/user_manager.tpl.htm
• docs/changelog.txt
• includes/ActiveRecordClasses.php
• includes/KBIndexContext.class.php
• includes/KBInflector.class.php
• includes/KBPublicContextSwitch.class.php
• includes/demoFramelessNodes.js.php
• includes/extlib/activerecord/ActiveRecord.class.php
• includes/function.php
• includes/smarty_plugins/function.printstars.php
• index.php
• templates/Default/contact.htm
• templates/Default/index.htm
• templates/Default/indexwords.htm
• templates/Directory/contact.htm
• templates/Directory/index.htm
• templates/Directory/indexwords.htm
• templates/Simple/contact.htm
• templates/Simple/indexwords.htm
• templates/lang.English.txt

Don’t forget to run updater after upload, we have modified the database too!

A new (stand-alone) version of KnowledgeBuilder has been released. The highlights are fixes for category administration bugs (deleting and moving them), as well as a bug in counting licensed users. A few display bugs were fixed. There were no changes made to the database — however, if you have 2.60.20, it’s worth upgrading to the latest version.

A very interesting thing we’re working on in the marketing department is writing case studies about our exceptionally successful clientele. I recently completed the newest case study, which explains how Backpacker Tours Australia uses 1-2-All to target niche markets, resulting in a loyal following of thrill-seekers and leisure-time travelers alike.

A lot of businesses, I come to find out, make their entire living essentially just by using our software (yeah, it’s that good.) Plenty more use our products to augment their existing business, to give them the decisive edge in the areas of marketing and support.

If yours is one of the many businesses that realize a unique benefit from using ActiveCampaign software, consider coming forward and helping us understand how and why our products have become an integral part of your business. What challenges do you face as a business, and how does our software fit in to your overcoming of those obstacles? How does our software assist you in meeting and exceeding your goals, in excelling within your market?

Helping us to author your success story can mean increased recognition of your company’s status and accomplishment, as well as having the ability to influence the direction we take our development strategy. After all, what’s important to our most successful clients is doubly important to us.

So go ahead and take 5 minutes to explain your relationship with 1-2-All, KnowledgeBuilder, or SupportTrio. Thanks, and enjoy.

With the lastest version of [KnowledgeBuilder][1] came a huge change in how much flexibility the system gives you to tailor KB to your site’s look and feel. It used to be that the “public” section of KB was a collection of half HTML half PHP pages that were difficult to understand and edit. About the only thing you could do easily was specify a header and footer and change some colors via the master CSS file. Knowledge Builder 2.5x now uses the Smarty Template Engine to allow you to completely customize how your KB site looks and how the information is presented.
[1]: http://www.activecampaign.com/kb “KnowledgeBuilder”
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Today we released a minor update to KB. Version is 2.50.5

Covers a couple small issues such as the “sub category” header always being displayed when there is no sub category and some fixes for the KB admin startup page along with the KB export to pdf feature.