Help needs help!

Time slot:

March 8th, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM

Room:

Michigan A/B

Problem:

Drupal 7’s core help system is better than Drupal 6’s thanks to standardizing the content of the help hooks and having a consistent link out to the module’s online documentation. This is a good start, but there are still a couple of issues:
- The text can only be updated via patches.
- Because it’s in code, it is under string freeze and can’t be updated later on.
- Help pages are constrained to a single page per module.
- Help has been forked into Advanced Help for some contrib modules, which is inconsistent (many end users don’t know about it).

Proposed solution:

Need to discuss the possibility of using d.o as a help server vs. moving to Advanced Help consistently vs. changing to keeping the bulk of the help docs online.

My personal take at this point is to keep brief docs in core and the bulk on d.o OR if it’s actually feasible to use d.o as a docs server (through RDF when it’s upgraded to D7? who knows...) or have a separate subdomain like sun suggests in the D8 help issue, but that seems somewhat redundant to the d.o docs... (I think the core devs will have great ideas here that will help us solve this.)

Angie’s suggestion/rationale for this as a topic: http://groups.drupal.org/node/118474#comment-382709
Jennifer’s issue filed against D8: http://drupal.org/node/1031972
Post about the D7 help hook standardization: http://affinitybridge.com/blog/story-drupal-7-core-help-update