Best Practice: Help System ?

[TheJuice]

Hi,
I'd like to implement a help system on a website, but I'm not sure one the best way to proceed...

I'd like to be able to display some help on part of each page: close to anything that has to be explained to the user.
But this on-page help should be kept short, and a link would allow the user to access a more thourough help page, with detailed explanations, maybe also about other topics: a general searchable help page...

I was thinking on storing all help in a database, with those fields (but this is only a thought, not already coded):
id | title | summary | content | category1 | category2

The "summary " would be the text displayed on regular pages of the website.
The "content" would be for the detailed help page.
"category1" and "category2" would allow to display the help page like a directory tree on the help page...

So tell me, what have you done on your websites?
What do you think of what I said? Any visible flaws?

Thank you for all your input,
Philippe.

[4ebura6ka]

Hi,
I think it's better for you to look towards created help sistems. You can find a lot of good ideas there. I don't want to praise Microsoft corporation, but they done a lot of work at help sistems creating. Appreciate it...
Good luck.

[TheJuice]

Well I'm looking for a way to do that in PHP, because it would have to be incorporated into the pages of the website...

Maybe some people made scripts / applications for that.