[drupal-docs] Dead links in documentation

[Charlie Lowe]

Thanks for sharing the process. It's clear that we cannot change the 
links for now. However, will adding the following text to the beginning 
of each module admin/help module documentation overly complicate what 
you have created with the script:

<i>This documentation applies to Drupal 4.x and is available through 
administer >> help in your Drupal installation with live links to the 
relevant configuration options</i>

There will be slight variations in that it might read

"Drupal 4.7"

or "Drupal 4.6-4.7"

I'm assuming that it will be easy to remove this.

Kieran Lal wrote:
> On Sep 23, 2005, at 5:57 AM, Kobus Myburgh wrote:
> 
>> Comments, suggestions or alternative solutions anybody?
> 
> 
> This is very much an imperfect solution.  There are now about 70  
> administration help pages in the Drupal handbook.  This is was the  
> single most requested feature in a survey of 200 Drupal users.
> 
> We made the decision to single source this documentation on  Drupal.org 
> and then generate Administration help as code from those  pages.    
> Unfortunately, until a developer steps forward and codes a  solution to 
> create administration help code from the handbook we need  to keep links 
> inside the single source.   This is absolutely  annoying.   I understand.
> 
> Here is what my scripts do:
> 1) Generate a list of urls for the handbook module pages.  Turns  this: 
> aggregator, archive, block, into http://drupal.org/handbook/ 
> modules/aggregator,  http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/archive, ...
> 2) wget's the list of urls so I have the pages local.
> 3) run structured grep on handbook module pages to get just the core  
> page and not the blocks etc.
> 4) For each page take a list of relative url's and generate an array  of 
> variable names mapped to urls.
> 5) For each page create the tfunction which has a list of of  variables 
> mapped to urls for each module.
> 6) For each page convert the relative urls into variables for the  
> tfunction
> 7) For each page concatenate the "case: admin/help"statement with the  
> core text with the links listed in a tfunction statement
> 8) For each page add the paragraph "For more information read  the 
> ....modulename handbook page" and link to the Drupal handbook.
> 
> Now you have to put in the module and create a patch.   I would  
> estimate the first time we created these patches it took about 20  hours 
> to clean up the source documentation, create the patches and  test all 
> the links.   It's a lousy boring job and nobody wants to  commit the 
> time to do.
> 
> The only thing worse is knowing that thousands of Drupal users can  not 
> figure out you administer page content type at administer >>  content >> 
> configure >> content types >> configure page.
> 
> If you don't have the absolute links you are going to have to keep a  
> separate table with all the paths to generate the relative links when  
> you create the patches.    That means looking up adminster >> content  
>  >> configure >> content types >> configure
> 
> and figuring out the path is: node/configure/types/page
> 
> You need to do this in a scalable way so that we can have a list of  all 
> the links for at least the 70 modules and we should grow to over  200 
> modules.
> 
> Developers are welcome to code this.
> 
> Cheers,
> Kieran
> 
> 
> 
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Kobus
>>
>> [1] http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/poll
>>
>>
>> -- 
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>>
>>
>