[GSoC proposal] Conditional text for the Drupal help system and the documentation team

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tamasd's picture

Conditional text for the Drupal help system and the documentation team

“The basic idea of conditional text is to evaluate an expression, and display text if it's true. “
In short, this is what my proposed module will do.

However, sometimes the conditions will be topic level, sometimes it will be within the topic. The expressions must be user readable (eg.: module is views with version greater than 3.0). There can be 3 kind of displays of a conditional text: visible, hidden, collapsed fieldset, which can be chosen by the site builder.

The UI will be split into two different parts. One part will be for the site builders: they can choose which display will be used if the condition is true or false. The second part is for the doc writers. It will be possible to define user defined conditions (maybe using taxonomy vocabularies here can make sense), and assign human-readable labels for certain conditions.

The module itself will be rather a framework, which will utilizes a flexible plugin system (probably with dynamic hooks, something similar what I have developed in Drucumber), in order to be very extensible to meet the future needs. I will also plan to use the CTools plugin API here.

This will provide a possibility to add expressions from various domains (module existence / version, skill level, target audience etc).

The module will also use a “permission” or “requirement” system, which means that if the documentation is downloaded to a site, and a requirement is not satisfied (eg.: there is a paragraph about views, but views is not enabled), then the condition will be evaluated as false.

If I will have some spare time at the end of the summer, I might implement a system which checks the conditions right after writing, so the documentation writer can see if the condition is valid (there might be some special cases, where the condition is always true or false, or it might happen that the syntax is invalid), and what the evaluated value (where it makes sense).

The complete specification can be found here at the “Conditional text” section: http://drupal.org/node/1095012

Introduction:
My name is Tamás Demeter-Haludka, I am from Hungary. I study as a Computer Program Designer at the University of Szeged, and I work at Pronovix as a Drupal module developer since 2008 August.
I have a some contributed modules at Drupal.org, check my profile: http://drupal.org/user/372872
I have successfully completed a Google Summer of Code at Drupal last year.
Besides Drupal, I contribute to other open source projects with bug reports (mostly the Linux distros and products I use: Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, KDE etc), and I have some experimental code on github: https://github.com/Yorirou

I am primarily available on Skype (my id is yorirou), and I regularly (more than once a day) check my e-mail (yorirou@gmail.com). I seldom visit IRC, my nick is yorirou.

My mentor will be Jennifer Hodgdon, the leader of the Drupal documentation team.

Comments

+1

Itangalo's picture

This is great. Looking forward to seeing interesting things happen.

+1

jhodgdon's picture

And yes I have agreed to mentor.

I've agreed to be a local

kvantomme's picture

I've agreed to be a local co-mentor for Tamas

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Check out more of my writing on our blog and my Twitter account.

Fantastic! Awesome GSoC

eric_sea's picture

Fantastic! Awesome GSoC project.