Revamp of the Help System in Drupal

Duplicate of http://groups.drupal.org/node/9448

The help text all over the Drupal administration, to much extent, mainly remains a part to boast about as a feature. The help text is unable to provide immediate help on common implementations. It provides an overview of the terminology used and possible features on a administration page/form.

For Google SOC this year, I'm proposing a revamp of the Help System in Drupal. We currently provide an overview of features on that particular page, but not answers to commonly asked questions or attempted implementations. Read on for my proposed goals targeting this.

• Infrastructure for help system to refer from external sites.

  • Official Wiki-like Help content registry at, say help-server.drupal.org which can provide more in-depth and task oriented help topics, providing an administrator quick help without hoping around the handbooks.
  • Ship with default help contents, for the core modules.
  • Help wiki may maintain help content for each version of core as well as contributed modules.
  • Unofficial Help content websites may exist. Possibly opens doors for future commercial implementations.
  • Cached Help content/material.

• Unbind the help material from the content of a page. Theme designers shall be able to request the help material on a particular part of a page using a themed $help PHPTemplate variable. Some of the possible places for help material can be:

  • Inline help above the page’s content. (As currently implemented).
  • In regions, as a block.
  • Separate page linked by a Tab, Button etc.
  • Modal popup window, etc.
  • Possibly ship with theme_help_popup(), etc. including theme_help_layer() theme_help_inline().

• Revamped Help page in administration.

  • Portal like Help topics overview page.
  • Two columns layouts.
  • Index of in-depth help topics fetched from help registry.
  • Help Search.

Basically, the more in-depth articles are handbook tutorials, available quickly to the user within the administration pages. Maybe, instead make the book.module compatible as a registry. The help on the top of a page can link to contextual help topics after a quick and dirty search. There's also room for a separate help file for modules like example.help which may contain help material. But then it's going to implement hooks using PHP, so more or less it can be implemented from within the module itself. Maybe it can stay as optional to keep the help text clutter separate from actual code.

New comers to Drupal are unable to put in the right keywords for searching a particular way of various common tasks, or simply they get lost. Such a revamp can mean a lot when targeted at new administrators/adopters who tend to learn as they use it.