[development] Preparing for 5.0 string freeze

[Neil Drumm]

Gabor Hojtsy wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Angela Byron wrote:
>> b) Reading of error messages, help text, field descriptions, etc. for
>> clarity. If something's not clear, we need patches submitted to make
>> it more clear.
> 
> The 4.7 release have seen help text edited and refined as handbook
> pages. Was this only an initial energizing method, or does this method
> failed? Now it does not seam that the 5.0 help texts will get generated
> from handbook pages as it seems.

The root problem is that help texts are in PHP code. The sets of people
who can edit PHP code and write good help text have a relatively small
intersection. And the workflow is shorter; edit a page happens much
quicker than patch, edit, diff.

Help texts as nodes on Drupal.org seems like a fine idea until you have
to get them back into Drupal. I hear that part is annoying. It was
painful to watch Kieran try and make it work when I was his coworker at
CivicSpace.

Long term, some sort of magic help system with easy editing fixes this.
For now, use the best text storage method for collaborators who are
working on a specific text and put up a patch when done.

-- 
Neil Drumm
http://delocalizedham.com/