Installation of the Attachment Indexing plugins

PHPKB knowledge base software is able to index text content of the files attached to knowledge base articles in order to make them searchable. Attachment indexing is supported in all editions of PHPKB knowledge base software. Some documents types can be searched without any additional tools, others need PHP modules enabled or third party tools (plugins) installed. All these modules (plugins) and 3rd party tools are free.

Installation of Plugins to Search Attached Files on Windows Server

1. Find the "ext" subdirectory of your PHP installation (it is C:\PHP\ext\ by default).
2. Check if the following files exist in that folder: php_mbstring.dll, php_zip.dll.
3. If any of these files do not exist, you should run PHP installation and install appropriate modules (Mbstring or PHP ZIP respectively).
   Note: If you have PHP 5.3 or higher, you need not to enable PHP ZIP extension as it is already built-in to the PHP engine.
4. Open the php.ini configuration file of your PHP engine in any text editor such as notepad.
5. Search for the "extension=" (without quotes).
6. You'll find the section with the list of PHP extensions. Some of them are commented with # symbol.
7. You should enable these modules by removing comment symbol (#).
8. Save php.ini file.
9. Restart the web server for changes to take effect.

1. The "phpkb/admin/" folder contains the following plugins:
• xlhtml (required for Excel 2003 files)
• pphtml (required for PowerPoint 2003 files)
• pdftotext (required for PDF files)
2. If your server runs under IIS, you should grant the Internet Guest Account with the read and execute permissions to "admin" folder. If it is Apache server, you should check which user runs the Apache process and grant read and execute permissions for that user.
3. There is a folder called "antiword" under "admin" folder of your PHPKB installation. You need to copy that folder to "C:\" of your server so that its path becomes "C:\antiword\".
4. Add read and execute permissions for the web-server to this folder and its contents as well.

Installation of Plugins to Search Attached Files on Linux/Unix Server

What to do after installation of indexing plug-ins?

1. Go to the PHPKB admin control panel.
2. Go to the Tools » Manage Settings » Miscellaneous Settings.
3. Set check box on the "Search File Attachments" and on each document type as shown in the image below.
   
   
   
4. Click on "Save Changes" button to save the settings.

PHPKB knowledge base software is able to index the text content of PDF documents and make them searchable. It converts a PDF file to text file format to search its contents. It uses "pdftotext utility" to convert Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text. It reads the PDF file, and writes a text file thus making itself able to search within the contents of PDF documents.

It may be necessary to disable attachment indexing for specific file types if conversion is unable to process the attachments due to size or other error. When disabled, conversion will be bypassed for only specified file types. Attachment indexing can also be disabled for all types if desired.

1. Go to the PHPKB admin control panel.
2. Go to the Tools » Manage Settings » Miscellaneous Settings.
3. Remove check box on the "Search File Attachments" if you would like to disable indexing for all file types.
4. Remove check box for specific file types if you would to disable indexing for those file types.

Knowledge Base Software
A knowledge base (abbreviated KB) software is a special kind of system for knowledge management, providing the means for the computerized collection, organization, and retrieval of knowledge. A knowledge base can also be defined as a collection of data representing related experiences, their results in the form of problems and solutions.