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Context Sensitive Help
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By The Trinidad Kid , Section Dev Notes []
Posted on Wed Feb 27, 2002 at 03:43:13 PM PST
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Release 3 of the Context Sensitive Help can be found on Scottish Political Discussion. (The server is taking a pounding from un peu de kids de scripte a cette moment ci, so it's a bit icky.)
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This is the first deployment of the Context Sensitive Help outlined in this development note.
It is also intended to be a baseline for usability testing as outlined in this story.
To that end I have monkeyed around with the front screen and the structure of the site. The intention is to have a 'usable' Scoop out of the box and we need to have a conversation (as a community) about what like that is...
The context sensitive help is implemented through 'helpvars' which are an extension/clone of the vars/blocks concept. They are interpolated after blocks and vars and there is a var which switches that interpolation off or on so that (with a little clever design) context sensitive help can be enabled or disabled by the admin. (Scoop cleans up unsubstituted |interpolation-like-thingies| and bins them before serving the page.) Subsequent releases will add to that a user preference for making help visible.
This release is a somewhat of Potemkin Village in that although Admin screens exist they only display the database content for the help system but they don't allow you to manipulate it (Releases 4 and 5). The help system flexs depending on whether options (ie diaries) are on or off. I have conceptually split admins and developers in that someone with admin rights to vars, blocks and helpvars is assumed to be a 'developer' otherwise they are an 'administrator'. Context senstive help changes with these categories.
I assume that all people with any admin status should see all the admin help prompts (even for things they can't do). If you want to see it in action create an account, e-mail me, and I will let you have developer status by giving you permissions for 'helpvars' which you can't administrate 'cos I've not written the code yet.
I have sucked all the available help into one big document (and commited a range of offenses against the poor sods who have written it for which I apologise) and added user help to the admin/developer stuff. These documents need to be cleaned up before they can be folded back into the CVS tree.
To ease the pain of developing the help documents the code outputs it in a format that is tagged with comments. There is then a script that takes that comment-tagged HTML and generates a set of SQL insert statements from it which allows the help to be written in an HTML editor and saves the poor developer from writing HTML fragments in KMySQL.
Thanks to everyone who came to my assistance when I was in deployment hell. |
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