[drupal-devel] Coding style for admin help: please come to a consensus for the docs team
Hello, In response to a user survey of documentation needs, the Drupal documentation team is working on writing consistent and usable admin help documentation for core and contributed modules. We are maintaining this documentation in the Drupal handbook, as a single source for built-in and on-line help documentation. Each core and contributed module will have an executive summary section in the handbook. This text will also be interpolated into the _help hook of each module as the admin help text. Current admin help text and older handbook module pages will be accessible from this executive summary. The benefits are: 1) consistent and usable documentation. 2) a single source for documentation, which will be the handbook. We are currently trying to automate the process of interpolating the admin help from the handbook on Drupal.org into the module code. Unfortunately, the coding style around the _help hook is quite inconsistent. It would be appreciated if the Drupal development community could come to some consensus so that the documentation team can easily create a large number of patches in a reasonably automated way. Improvements here will also likely help with extraction of text for translation, and with eventually removing hardcoded text from the code entirely. I have created a table of 61 modules and samples of the many different styles of coding (see below [1]). For example, in the core modules, node.module and user.module both use PHP to dynamically create content. Some but not all of the core modules use the second parameter to t() for formating URLs. He has extracted samples of the admin help from 30 contributed modules. The code is not exact but should give you a flavor of the inconsistency, including the use of theme calls, in location.module, and multitple t() calls for a single piece of text. There is also code in the the HTMLarea module admin help to check if needed modules are present. Djun / Kieran [1] Table of Admin help samples: http://civicspacelabs.org/home/node/ 12711 Useful links: Core modules: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules Contributed modules: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/contributions Executive summaries of modules are now at: http://drupal.org/ handbook/modules/modulename
participants (1)
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Kieran Lal