Forum OpenACS Q&A: Dynamic Help System for OpenACS

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Posted by Frank Bergmann on
Hi,

Nima Mazloumi wrote in
https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=294931

Here some other thoughts:
[...]
- Dynamic Help System for OpenACS [...]

We (the Project/Open core team) are planning activities in the same direction. P/O has become quite complex yet and we would really like to provide users with some context-sensitive help.

- Improved, consistent and exhaustive Developer Guide
- User & Administration Guide for dotLRN

We have done these already for P/O (check the PO-Documentation.xxx.zip at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=86419), may be you want to copy some stuff (I think that content from our Unix Admin Guide have already become part of the OpenACS installation guide...).

Our current idea of a context sensitive help is to add little "Help" icons to all major P/O objects such as pages, "components" ("portlets" in OpenACS terminology) and in the fields of edit/new pages. The main idea would be to mimic the Shift-F1 help of the MS products.

However, implementing such functionality is a _serious_ hassle. And not only because of the number of help entries. It's the maintenance of any "hard references" (URLs, ...) during the lifecylce of the application that really preocupies us.

So our idea is to use the newly developed P/O search engine
(https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message%5fid=287348) in order to "index" our user guides. A "Help" entry would basicly consist of one or two keywords that would return the list of all user guide references via the search engine. Darn simple, isn't it?

Any comments welcome! I know there are some usability experts participating in this forum. I would be particularly interested in your feedback, as the technical implementation seem(!) to be relatively straight-foward...

Bests,
Frank

mailto:frank_dot_bergmann_at_project_dash_open_dot_com
http://www.project-open.com/