[drupal-devel] [task] Improve helpsystem and helptexts

[adrinux]

Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/20760

 Project:      Drupal
 Version:      cvs
 Component:    base system
 Category:     tasks
 Priority:     normal
 Assigned to:  stefan nagtegaal
 Reported by:  stefan nagtegaal
 Updated by:   adrinux
 Status:       patch

-1 on removing the help texts. I personally have found them useful on
several occassions, the short text is useful for telling you what to do
on a given page, but it's the long help text that can be helpful to
understand how - for instance - the permissions or taxonomy systems
work.


As a compromise they could perhpas be moved to drupal.org and linked
from within Drupal, but it's a lot harder for people to provide
'patches' for content on drupal.org, and makes translation a real
problem.


Removing them because they're out of date doesn't really address the
issue.




adrinux



Previous comments:
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April 18, 2005 - 14:16 : stefan nagtegaal

Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/helptext-removal.diff (89.03 KB)

I know of you guys are falling from their chair when seeing this patch,
but...


The attached patch removes all long helptexts which are used by the
help.module to display them.
I - and i know there are more people who thinks about that the same way
- believe that, with a good CMS these kind of very long helptexts are
not needed. I would prefer to improve the short helptexts on top of
every page, instead of these longer versions.


The documentation team already started to improve these short texts, to
reflect what people could do on a certain page..


Another reason to delete these helptexts was that there were almost
none of the translators who translated them. I'm not sure if that is
because the text is too large, or the info is outdated..


But, i think it would be better to remove these... See also the related
thread here:
http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-docs/2005-04/msg00008.html


By applying this patch, the help.module will be deprecated... :-)




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April 18, 2005 - 15:01 : Uwe Hermann

Hm, I'm not sure whether the help texts should be removed altogether,
but making them shorter and more concise is definately a good thing.