Forum OpenACS Development: Mandatory Help Texts

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
I would like to get a feeling if people would agree to make help texts for ad_form mandatory. This can be achieved fairly easily by checking if there is a help_text for each form item and if not set the help_text to "[_ $package_key.$form_name.$item_key]". This would not break existing functionality, but make the [i] sign appear all the time (with a broken message_key until people find the nerve to add a helptext 😊).

This is a first step to get our User Interface act together and I strongly think we should make adding help_texts as mandatory as possible (and the way described above makes absolutely sure it will happen like this). Furthermore this takes the help_texts out of the hands of the developers and into the hands of the testers which might be a very good idea as well, as they most likely know what help to provide users on a particular entry field.

For obvious reasons I'd make a TIP out of it and implement this on 5.2 once enough data is collected.

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2: Re: Mandatory Help Texts (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
The general feeling at the moment is to not make it mandatory but think of a way to support help texts in an easier manner. I will think about it some more and redraft this.