Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.Providing suitable help is a key need in Debut.
The Advanced Help module is the way to go. The helpinject module is a promising tool for advanced help authoring but needs some extending. I've posted a patch at #895554: Allow adding help to existing modules.
Comments
Comment #1
nedjoAs part of that patch I've posted a new module, http://drupal.org/project/helpinjector.
Will start adding help to Debut features using helpinject.
Comment #2
nedjoHave now added help to various Debut features.
Comment #3
dnotes commentedNedjo, thanks for putting some thought and effort into this promising area. I'm playing around with Debut stuff, considering adopting it for a couple of projects and contributing to the efforts, but there are a few barriers for me in terms of the philosophy so I thought I'd try to join the conversation. One of my barriers is the "help" issue. I was playing around with this the other day and I noticed that on every field of the image type there was a help topic explaining all about Debut features (http://share.dnotes.net/2010-10-08_14-20-48.png). As a site administrator, I definitely don't want my users to have to digest that. In fact, I find it hard to think of any help text that could be generic enough to apply to an image content type on every site and yet still be helpful to users. What if I don't want a minimum image size? What if I use filefield sources? What if I don't want the alternate text ability? I'm wondering if the help-on-everything will actually be helpful, or if it will define too specifically what these modules can / should do and thus negate any benefits of trying to make them generic features. And if some sort of generic help for an image field is ever appropriate, it seems to me that such help should be added by the imagefield module, not by a feature.
Comment #4
nedjoThanks for the thoughtful comments!
A lot of the issue stems from #248758: Allow help to be sectioned for different user groups: we don't yet have a permission system to restrict advanced help item access.
I'll think about this and talk to rosemarymann, who's worked on these features.
Possible steps might be:
* Remove the link to the base help page (the one in your screenshot) from the node form and instead have it on the content type's form instead so it's visible only to admins.
* Refine help text to remove specific numbers that may be overridden, but retain where feasible useful instructions.
What do you think?
Do such instructions better belong in the relevant modules, e.g. imagefield? Good question. I assume that in debut we may be able to be more specific than we could in imagefield, since the feature does make some decisions. Also, it would be hard to achieve a standard that all modules would follow for providing (in this case) field-related help. So, yes, it's worth thinking about.
Comment #5
nedjoDid a round of help cleanup of all Debut features.
Comment #6
nedjoRemoved dependency on helpinjector for Drupal 7. Found the help authoring approach using Helpinject too clunky. Removed all help for initial D7 beta releases. Will look at selectively restoring some help.