I just spent my first hour trying out ERPNext and one very important feature for me is some sort of wiki where my coworkers can find bootstrapping information about naming conventions, directory structures and in-house tools they can use to speed up their workflows.
The Website > Knowledge Base module seems to be what I’m looking for but I have a few issues with it.
404 Page Missing or Moved
I would except Frappe Cloud to redirect to some kind of global table of content for the knowledge base but it shows a 404 page. Is there a way create a custom page for this URL? A behaviour like the one on the official ERPNext documentation is what I’m looking for https://erpnext.org/docs/ How is this achieved?
The second issue (which seems more like a bug to me) is that, when viewing an article, the category link in the sidebar redirects to .com/kb/a which is OK (200) while the category link in the “breadcrump” navbar at the top redirects to .com/kb/a/None which is another mising page (404).
Is there a way to mark a knowledge base article as private to the public and only accessible to certain of my coworkers? The note module can do that but not the knowledge base. I would use the notes as my knowledge base system but unfortunately there isn’t the nice UI, navigation and tree structure that the knowledge base has.
Also regarding the notes, I find it a bit weird that even if a user doesn’t have the necessary privileges to edit a note, ERPNext lets you enter edit mode regardless, and only after you wrote your update, when you try to publish it, you are informed that it is not possible. The user can waste a lot of time writing something that they can’t do anything with or am I missing something?
Knowledge Base search
Is there a search feature in the knowledge base module. If so, where to find it?
I think it would also be very useful for the documentation on the official ERPNext website.
I had pretty much the same idea of using the kb as internal wiki. unfortunately it’s not possible to restrict kb articles from being published on the website served by ERPNext.
To remain internal you can try to see how far the Note may get you.
If you want to start an initiaive to add private kb functionality, let me know. I may hop aboard
Thanks, I tried the note module yesterday and it’s certainly an option but it is lacking the nice navigation between notes, index page (or sidebar), etc. that is present in the knowledge base.
I would love to implement the feature myself but I’m not proficient enough I’m afraid. I sometimes write tools for 3d sofware packages but have no experience in web dev. Actually be honest I couldn’t even get the bench started once installed on my VPS, hence why I’m using the hosted trial.
This has been a very weird install process for me by the way. install.py always fails the first time around (at init bench) but succeeds the second time. And once I do “sudo bench setup production frappe” the app works but all the pages are empty (just a navbar with a home and login links). If I try to “sudo bench update” the script fails (subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command ‘[‘npm’, ‘install’, ‘socket.io’]’ returned non-zero exit status -9) and nginx returns “Internal Server Error” in the browser.
Anyway if I can’t even install the production server I will have a hard time doing development on ERPNext
It’s been a while since I tried it but if I recall it right there is some way to link between notes, put them in a hierachy or sort them in folders.
I think you can actually create some sort of index whit links to the actual articles. Maybe you just need to poke a little deeper
That being said … I totally agree it would be much nicer to being able to restrict access to kb articles (and I would imagine it was not even very hard to achieve, even though I may be even less capable of coding like you).
We’ve decided on a different solution than ERPNext after all. There’s just too many pain points starting out so I’m a bit wary of the time lost running into similar issues down the road. It’s a shame because I loved the idea of solving so many problems with just this one software package.
I tried creating an index note in the Note module as suggested in your previous message @vrms but this is neither “robust” nor a long-term solution:
If you use the “Link” button to create the link, “http://” is always added to the beginning of the URL, but as noted on the edit page:
To link to another record in the system, use “#Form/Note/[Note Name]” as the Link URL. (don’t use “http://”)
And even if I try to edit the link to remove the “http://” in the “To what URL should this link go?” field, it is added again when I click the insert button. So I end up having to dig into the html to manually remove the “http://”. I cannot except my non-technical coworkers to do that every time they want to add an internal link. Or am I missing something?
People writing notes need to remember updating the “index” note everytime they add a new note.
If someone rename a note X without updating every other note where this note X was linked, then the links break and you end up with 404 pages.
With so many issues (especially with internal links) I thought I was doing something wrong so I looked for the documentation on the note module. But unfortunately I couldn’t find or even search for it because, as I wrote in my first post, there is no search function for the knowledgebase, even in the official docs…
Maybe this is a solution if you have somebody on your team who knows the codebase and can patch things like these, or even add new features like the knowledge base privacy but I don’t think this is for us at this early stage. Too much time spent with installation issues or searching for work arounds (and I can’t even imagine implementing a custom feature) for a tool supposed to streamline your operations and thus help you save time
well, actually maybe building a wiki from the Notes is just not wuite what it has been made for and the goal should be to enhance Knowledge Base Module, so it can be used internally.
