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#119: Contextual help portlet
- Contents
- 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.
Participants
David Convent, Jonathan Lewis, Denis Mishunoff, Osman TartanogluTie in with problem tracking
The implications of this sort of tool are mind blowing IMO. I talked with David Content about it and he agrees with this approach but hasn't had time of late, so I thought I would record the idea.
Looking ahead: more intelligent help
In the future it would be good to be able to use more logic in order to provide more accurate help. For example, the contextual help would know if the login portlet is being displayed or not; if not, it wouldn't tell the user to look for a login portlet. And this might be taken further to assist the user, so that for example the login portlet CSS is changed to a bright red border to show the user where it is. Mac OS help used to do something like that, and I quite liked it. Obviously that's a good way down the road. We would face the usual problems of how far, and how, to separate content and logic. [Jonathan Lewis]