[documentation] [Documentation task] Re-thinking admin/help and module handbook synchronization

Sat Apr 15 05:05:50 UTC 2006

Issue status update for 
http://drupal.org/node/58845
Post a follow up: 
http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/58845

 Project:      Documentation
 Version:      <none>
 Component:    Installation
 Category:     tasks
 Priority:     normal
 Assigned to:  Anonymous
 Reported by:  webchick
 Updated by:   cel4145
 Status:       active

Two thoughts:

1) IMHO,the help hook method is a bad idea. This was the old method.
Help documentation rarely ever got updated. 

2) Another possible solution. Save the HTML code from the handbook for
a module in a file. Parse that to generate the patch.  Repeat. to
generate additional patches for each module. Make the script available
in CVS, allowing everyone to help in generating the patches and contrib
developers to patch their code with new help text versions whenever they
like.

cel4145

Previous comments:
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sat, 15 Apr 2006 04:50:16 +0000 : webchick

Some background on this issue is probably in order for the uninitiated.

*The idea: Create a set of unified end user documentation for modules*

I can't seem to find the original issue(s) where this was talked about,
but the jist is that the administer >> help section in Drupal used to be
a big mess; most modules just plain had no documentation. The ones that
did were all over the map in how they were presented -- some in first
person, some in third person, some were several screens long, others
were just a couple sentences.

So a bunch of people got together and created a set of guidelines [1]
for writing module documentation pages, and wrote a consistent set of
documentation for each module that followed a common format of two
paragraphs describing the module, followed by a list of links that lead
to "tasks" you can do with them. The result is now found in the Drupal
modules and features [2] and Contributed modules [3] sections.

*The challenge: Synchronizing the handbook pages with module help*

The next step was to take all this nice documentation that people had
written, and get it into the core and contrib modules' help hooks. To
solve this, I originally wrote the docbook2helphook [4] script, which
took a docbook export of the main modules book page, ran through and
parsed out the page titles, help text and threw it into proper t()
calls and all that stuff. After many (many, many, MANY ;)) revisions,
this effort eventually culminated in a huge, 133K+ core patch [5] that
synchronized the two. And all was good. For awhile. ;)

*And now, onto the problems... ;)*

There are numerous issues we now face:

1. The docbook exporting functionality was removed from core [6] during
the 4.7 development cycle. So there are no longer handy "export" links
on any of the pages.
2. The export functionality has now been moved to contrib modules such
as Export Docbook [7]. None of these are installed on Drupal.org, so
there is no longer a way to create an export of all module handbook
pages.
3. The Export Docbook module has system requirements which Drupal.org
does not have. This means the current script *will not work anymore* to
generate additional patches to keep the two synched.
4. In various "clean up" tasks that have gone on in 4.7 since the
initial patch, a lot of re-wording has happened both at the core module
help level and at the handbook level. As a result, the two are now *out
of sync* in certain places.
5. This method of synchronization also creates problems in that we
either need to have horrifically complicated markup syntax to delineate
links (like >strong class="drupal-admin-help">administer >>
help>/strong>), _or_ we have broken links/access denied all over the
place on the "you can" links which is pretty sad for "official"
documentation. :\
6. The link "for more information, see the XXXX handbook page" at the
bottom leads to a page on Drupal.org that says _exactly_ the same thing
as they were just reading (with the exception that sometimes more
sub-pages are found).
7. Because not everyone has edit permissions to the handbook, doing it
this way creates a barrier to people who want to make changes to the
text that's currently there. They need to make a documentation issue
about it and wait for one of the site admins to get a chance to change
it. This is particularly irksome if I'm a contrib module author and I
want to update my module's handbook page... I _could_ wait around for
some person to change it, or I could just change my hook_help
directly.. I know which one people will choose in most cases. :P

*Some partial solutions*

There are a couple possible partial solutions:

1. Use the Export DXML [8] module instead, and rewrite the
docbook2helphook script to parse dxml2helphook. This has a number of
advantages... DXML outputs additional semantic information, which means
far, far less parsing will probably be required on the part of the
script. This also opens up the possibility of other sites importing
Drupal handbook pages using the book import [9] module. #5 is still an
issue.

2. Do the opposite; update help text _only_ in core/contrib modules and
have the handbook just execute the help hooks to display them as a user
would normally see (with the exception that it would preg_replace the
links with strong tags). While this is pretty logical, it comes with a
couple strong disadvantages:

a) It requires people who want to contribute to documentation to submit
patches... since a lot of really good writers are not coders, and since
there are very few people contributing to documentation, the barrier to
participation is something worth considering... coders are often not the
best people to write end-user documentation.

b) There are security issues involved; while core modules would have a
guarantee to be free of any nastiness, we would definitely not be able
to apply this same strategy to contrib module documentation, which
might contain who knows what. :P

So. Any ideas? ;)

[1] http://drupal.org/node/24566
[2] http://drupal.org/handbook/modules
[3] http://drupal.org/handbook/config/contribmodules
[4]
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/tricks/docbook2helpho...
[5] http://drupal.org/node/26139
[6]
http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/drupal/modules/book.module?r1=1.333...
[7] http://drupal.org/node/38757
[8] http://drupal.org/node/39121
[9] http://drupal.org/project/bookimport