#119: Contextual help portlet
- Contents
A common problem with users new to Plone after the first install is "what do I do now"? This proposal aims to provide Plone with the capability for contextual help, and to make that help text customizable for a particular deployment if needed.
- Proposed by
- Alexander Limi
- Seconded by
- Martin Aspeli
- Proposal type
- Architecture
- State
- deferred
Motivation
Currently there is no way to show the user contextual help in Plone. Some examples would be:
- What can you do from the folder contents screen?
- How does the state pulldown work?
- What are content types?
For a customer project, we developed infrastructure for contextually dependent actions, and we would like to reuse this infrastructure to display contextually dependent help in the Plone interface.
This is a critical part of the first impression you get when you have just installed Plone and are wondering what to do next.
Proposal
We would like to have available a Contextual Help portlet in Plone.
It should ideally contain the 3-4 most commonly asked questions or relevant explanations for that particular context.
An example would be the Folder Contents screen:
- How do I order items?
- How can I chance the state of multiple items in one operation?
There also needs to be an easy way for Plone and its third party components to load content into the help system. This involves importing text and images from the filesystem.
Implementation
Some of this work has been started, and is owned by David Convent. However, that code is in need of a refresh, and needs to be completed and polished.
Risks
- Too much Happytalk™, to many help entries in a specific context. The contextual help should be short, succinct and to-the-point.
- Performance — we have tested it in production, and although it does impact performance, its impact should be small. This should be benchmarked and verified, though.

