[techtalk] knowledgebase solutions..

[Sarah]

Hi all,

One of my recent projects at work has been to attempt to find a good
knowledgebase solution for our support website. Our current 'solution' is
NT based and does things like take the machine down to a crawl (95% CPU
usage) doing one search- not a working solution, in my opinion. 

The problem I've run into is finding such a thing. I've found several
decent looking ones that are part of a "help desk solution" but not
available on their own. I've found a few others that look great, but are
based on either flat file db's or things like MS Access, which I simply
don't trust for these things. The few open source kb solutions I've found
aren't in a state where they have all, or even most of the pieces that
we're looking for. Most companies seem to be writing their own solutions
for this, or using these 'help desk solutions'. 

So, my question has a couple of parts- 

1. Does such a thing exist, in a ready working state? We're looking for
features like tracking what searches have been done, the ability to set up
a dynamic faq of the top 10 hits in several different categories, and an
easy way to have the help desk staff add new information. 

2. If not, do pieces exist that could be put together without writing the
whole thing from scratch? PHP would be my language of choice, but others
could be managed. This needs to be done faster then I can code with the
amount of time I have to devote to it. 

Any ideas, suggestions, etc would be welcomed. 

Thanks! 

--Sarah