Experimental project

This is a sandbox project, which contains experimental code for developer use only.

Overview

Drupal needs better tools for managing help/documentation. A better help system and a "Curated/Official Documentation System" would both be an answer. Making use of the entity system introduced in Drupal 7 combined with the concepts of DITA it is possible to upgrade the help system and make the life of both documentation creators and consumers easier. This project is meant to contribute to this matter as part of GSoC 2012.

Description will be expanded as the project goes on. See the full Help System proposal and the Help Topic GSoC proposal and the announcement by jhodgdon for additional details.

Features

  • Creation of "Documentation Entities" - entity with special bundles, represents a help/documentation topic, meant for documentation purposes.
  • "Topic-to-topic linking" - text filter that allows linking between these topics.
  • Creation of "Maps" - special bundle that is basically a smart collection of topics, represents a single level of an outline.
  • UUID support - for maintaining references between topics (think about importing/exporting documentation content)
  • Entity translation support.

Requirements

Known problems

  • New revision creation results in notices.
  • Module cannot properly clean up its fields during uninstall, which is a core issue: http://drupal.org/node/1115510.

Future plans

  • Short term
    • Proper revision support utilizing new features of the Entity API contrib
    • Revise permissions.
    • Bundle creation, new bundles would use the default set of fields.
    • Map/Outline builder interface.
    • Map/Outline navigation interface.
  • Mid term
    • Glossary feature:
      • Special bundle.
      • Textfilter that would turn glossary words into pop-up links.
      • Default Views display for showing an A-Z glossary list.
  • Long term
    • Contextual linking.
    • Improving the Helplink text filter, so that a remote site (help server) could be used as content source, if the UUID in the given Helplink is not available locally. One idea is a configurable weighted list of servers, where the module could look for the availablity of the topic in question, a link caching mechanism could be utilized, cron runs could check and maintain the links.

Project information

  • Created by temaruk on , updated