Posted by Gurpartap Singh on July 18, 2008 at 7:55am
Awaiting suggestions before I set my own standards
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Categories: Help System Discussions
Awaiting suggestions before I set my own standards
| Attachment | Size |
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| Diagram2.png | 65.85 KB |
Comments
yoroy's suggestion
Also worth nothing here is yoroy's suggested welcome page layout:
Only local images are allowed.
Nice
Yoroy's one is clean, nicely structured. This is a help page, users come here to look for help. Users looking for help don't need news about Gabor getting married or security updates (an explanation of how to look for updates is on the help page).
"Congratulations" could be a Drupal message. Or a page, with a link to the help center, more or less like Apache used to have.
But: which users are we talking about? Administrators? Users with admin permissions (if so, which)? To whom else are help pages available, and what will they see?
The only reason I like the
The only reason I like the community and security notices is because this appears to be the page you're greeted with on a first install. I'd like to see those items get up front to a new user. Otherwise, I agree they aren't appropriate for a help page.
yeah, I used the contents of
yeah, I used the contents of the welcome page here. My idea was that the index of the help == the welcome page, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
Yoroy, I'm coming late to
Yoroy, I'm coming late to the party but I really like the design you have above. I posted a patch earlier today (http://drupal.org/node/299506) but would like to combine some of the elements of your illustration with some of my text and some of Gurpartap's desire to have a help page landing zone. This could really work.
I like this design a lot -- to me, it seems very iPhone like (which, of course, is not a bad thing.)
I like aspects of both of
I like aspects of both of these. The high-profile search box is nice in yoroy's, but I also like the By Topic/By Module aspect of Gurpartap's. In general the layout of yoroy's seems to be prioritized the way I envision it. I do like the latest news, maybe just headlines from the d.o front page though. Really top level stuff.
One thing I don't see addressed, which might be good to add, is a notice when a security update has been released, along with a link to download/upgrade instructions. Just for core, not necessarily for contrib because that gets a bit messy.
Gurpartap, Topical help is
Gurpartap,
Topical help is something I've long thought about. We, of course, have most of the "about" pages for modules written, but have a real lack of "how to do things" documentation. Do you have a topical index in mind, or have you gotten this far down the road yet? I'll happily either help you put something together, or write articles for things on your list.
First, I think we need to
First, I think we need to finalize on the kind of documentation we will be including in core. At minimum, we can document each form field (textfield, checkboxes, etc.). And I am leaning towards this, because subjective help(the other case) has infinite possible cases and there will be unwanted issues for help most of the times. Again, objective help would be a quick documentation of a module's features(administration and end user pages).
And with this set, as the help module's help is special(cannot be browsed), there can be host pages to the rest of the modules' help. These host pages would contain topic lists, which are just linking to the respective feature's documentation page. Similar to the welcome page which is maintained at modules/help/help/welcome-page.html.
The best advice I can give
The best advice I can give you at this state, think of removing 50% (in both mockups). What is really necessary? You don't want to overwhelm the beginner.
I would keep the right hand
I would keep the right hand side of Yoroy's mock up as is.
The left hand side with the help/welcome text could be simplified further. If a new core theme that is easily user editable gets added; a 'how to edit this theme' or 'how to change themes' help link can be added to the welcome/help text.
Pipe to Usability?
Is there a way to assign this post also to the Usability group? Would love to join both camps on the issue.
Done!
Done!
I've got a patch at
I've got a patch at http://drupal.org/node/126221#comment-1189065 that allows an alternate page to be used for the default front page instead of the text hard coded into node.module (which is a major fail, and why I started that issue). If the getting started page where in the help section with that patch, it would be easy to make the user see the getting started page until they have posted content on their site.