Please improve Drupal Help Document.

Posted by anup.tilak on September 17, 2012 at 6:28am

Hi All,

I'm pretty new to Drupal Development, Experience with Wordpress. As I'm a new bee, sometime I'm not able to work things out and like a every developer I go to Google to find the things that I'm missing while developing. Help that I prefer is Drupal help, but to my surprise I always see the code on help document and not actual help. Why I should come to Help document if I want to see code. I can see that code on my drupal setup. Help document should be explanatory about the function and not function code itself.

See wordpress help for example,

http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_the_category,

It actually gives, what is the function, what are the param to send and what it will return, simple but very helpful help.

Comments

Try the Drupal API site

Posted by Tor Arne Thune on September 17, 2012 at 11:06am

Have you tried http://api.drupal.org/ ? Try a search for a function in Drupal (or Views) and you will find its parameters, what it returns, etc.
It may be a bit difficult to find for newcomers.

That is what I'm saying Tor,

Posted by anup.tilak on September 17, 2012 at 2:27pm

That is what I'm saying Tor, No offence to any one. But finding Drupal help to use it's core function is pain in nerve. Always new bee has to go for a toss to get to know the function. That is why I'm requesting for better help. I have gone through api's but it helps few times.

On the other hand, if we have functions listed on help section. With one line definition, param to pass, expected output, below that list of related functions. For new bee it is very helpful, easy to understand. Reading code on help document is not helpful as he can read the code from his setup files also.

Have you seen how wordpress gives function help in there codex, why can't drupal does that? It is real helpful.

How would you improve this, for example

Posted by douggough@drupal.org on September 17, 2012 at 6:21pm

Hi,

There's always room for improvement in the documentation. I've compared the link you provided to the documentation on the Drupal API site.
As an example, can you tell me how you would like to see this improved?

http://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21common.inc/function/drupal_g...

In your opinion, what is missing? What could be described better? What would make this more meaningful or useful to someone coming from Wordpress?

Thanks,

Doug Gough - Drupal Specialist