[drupal-docs] Re: [drupal-devel] Proposal to remove the help module and a permission

[Chris Messina]

Let's boil this down. 

1. We need as little clutter in our UIs as possible.
2. We need more easy-to-understand UIs so less help is needed
3. We need to provide various lengths of help
  a. in the UI
  b. one step off the UI (a link to a page within the site --
publishing guidelines for example)
  c. Offsite help (link to textile formatting page)

The specific example about taxonomy is, IMNSHO, moot. Taxonomy ISN'T
hard. The word "taxonomy" is. Changing it to "categories" was one big
step forward. Next is improving the UI to support them.

I mean, people unconsciously categorize stuff all the time. It's not
hard. What's hard is fitting the various taxonomies (aka categories)
in your head and know how to create them... hence the popularity of
folksonomies.

No categorization system is easy to create, but the idea is pretty
basic: Does the triangle piece fit in the round hole? No? Ok, then
where does it fit? And is it equilateral, isosceles, scalene, etc? So
even subcategories isn't hard to think about. But on Drupal, everyone
has a hard time getting it because the UI gets in your way...

Geeks "get" vocabularies and terms and all that. Normal people don't
(no offense meant to either group, it's linguistic). Let's have some
sense about this and realize that if categories are the hardest thing
to get in the Drupal UI, than we don't need longer help text, we need
more helpful UIs.

Chris


On Fri, 7 Jan 2005 22:12:36 +0100, Bèr Kessels <berdrupal at tiscali.be> wrote:
> Op vrijdag 7 januari 2005 20:21, schreef Neil Drumm:
> > Does anyone like the existence of the long help texts?
> Not me.
> 
> They are far too limited t o explain something like taxonomy (dont count
> yourself as reader here, since you know taxonomy by now, consider someone
> without a clue about it). But it is far too bloated to be usefull as quick
> reference. For thats what it should be for.
> 
> --
> Regards,
>  Bèr
> --
>  [ Bèr Kessels | Drupal services www.webschuur.com ]
>