[TYPO3-hci] Some thoughts on context help

[Uschi Renziehausen]

Hello all and a nice start of the week :-)

Pondering about the 'less ways to do it'-thread I thought how much 
easier the life even of experienced t3developers would be with an 
improved inline help.

If you want to explore typo3 or look up something you once knew, the 
context help shall be your friend. The problem is only, that in certain 
areas of the BE (e.g. page types / page properties), the context help 
has to serve two types of users, who in many cases have very different 
needs: the site developers/admins and the authors. In its current 
default state, there are many cases, where csh does not help either of 
those. Those cases can be divided into two categories:

1) The easy case: wording of the label and/or the explanation is wrong 
or lacks some necessary information.
2) the more complicated case: the information for the authors is 
entirely dependent on how the site developer/admin has configured that item.


some ideas:

* add a new field for developer related help; internally it could be 
devhelp, on the surface: developer's help, shows up as a second icon 
(question mark) which I can enable through my user setup.

* a strict division between what is there by default when typo3 ships to 
you and what a site developer/admin changes for the authors (perhaps 
stored in a different file and then merged with the default values?)

* 'FE editing' for csh and labels. This way you could get rid of the 
context field, because you have it in front of your eyes. (I personally 
think it impossible to describe the context in a meaningfull way when 
dealing with such complex forms).

Furthermore, one would not have to know which text is to be found in 
which file and could have a really nice gui for editing the help files. 
The current layout of ll xml is not what I would call comfortable. 
Perhaps one could even use the RTE and thus having real markup? You 
write html, using certain elements and classes and they are then 
converted into docbook-xml?


Prosit, Uschi!