I really like the idea of extension writers being able to extend the
help system (Section #1) -- say adding documentation for their tags
or explaining how to use their UI elements, or adding context
sensitive help to their UI elements. Then you could crank out a PDF
and have it be a complete user's guide -- extensions and all.
I plan to make radiant-help easily printable, but Mohit's idea for a
book is a good one, although to me seems like it would be a more in-
depth look at Radiant and far too long for a help system.
radiant-help allows you to provide whatever help information you want,
but it assumes that its for an extension. It'll also display details
for any loaded constant if it has version, url, and/or description.
If for example you have radiant-help installed and go to admin/help/
Radiant, you'll get:
"It appears that do you have Radiant installed, but I can't find any
documentation for you. Sorry."
I thought that would be an interesting way to auto-discover docs about
something in the core... but I haven't done more than that.
Or if you go to an extension that you have installed but that hasn't
registered any help admin/help/TestExtension
"No help information is provided at this time.
TestExtension version is: 1.0
TestExtension description is: Describe your extension here
TestExtension url is: http://yourwebsite.com/test";
What I'd also like to do is add shards-like regions to the basic help
info to allow people to add in their own information to the basic docs
before or after certain parts. I'm hoping that would give me a way to
provide client specific information.
Aside from that, I think it makes sense to include role based docs,
but I haven't tackled that yet.
I've written 2 other apps that included an inline help system where I
tracked a needs_help field on the User and conditionally displayed
help in the interface. I want to be able to provide something like
that as well.
I don't want to hijack this thread though, since it wasn't radiant-
help centric. My basic goal is to provide info for those using Radiant
(including admin and developers), not necessarily for those developing
parts for it (such as how to integrate with other apps, or how to
write your own extension, etc).
It would be *very* nice, however, for RadiantCMS.org to offer a
place for extension developers to more formally show off their wares
and encourage a standardized style to the documentation. This would
make it easier for users to find extensions and learn about them
(since their documentation would follow a standard the user would
quickly learn).
I'm not sure that you'd offer a lot of space for extension
developers but perhaps just a page like: http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins
Sean is working on something like that. Ask him about it, he has all
the time in the world :)
-Jim
PS. For anyone that missed it, I'm talking about
http://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-help/tree/master
And I'd love some help setting it up.
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