Proposals regarding Tiki Documentation

Help make Tiki even better: use this wiki page to enter your proposals regarding documentation.

Best-guess Links to Documentation Based on Parameters

Proposed by: Rick Cogley
Proposal Date: 27 Jan 04

In webhelp, it might be useful to have a system whereby, if a user clicks on the webhelp icon, Tiki:

1. attempts to open the web help for that feature which corresponds to the current running Tiki version, or if none is available,
2. opens the next available version down to present the user with at least something usable.

Prerequisites and Assumptions

Not understanding the "guts" of Tiki, I believe there are some prerequisites which would need to be cleared first:

• Documentation update passes would usually be done for major, not minor, versions of Tiki.
  • That's already the plan Chealer9
• The gross version of the installed Tiki would need to be retrievable. This version number — 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.x — is the major version of the Tiki installation, ignoring minor sub-versions. This number could be used to "group" documents into a set. There should be a history of gross version numbers somewhere.
• The "preferred help language" would also need to be retrievable.
  • We lack a Multilingual Tiki for that. The best thing now is to start document in other languages. Maybe then some will want to improve our dogfood. Applies to items under also Chealer9
• Each documentation page could have a "recommended for versions" tag, in which the Tiki versions that that particular page explains acceptably well are listed.
• Each documentation page would have a language tag and an ID.
• There should be an intuitive way to edit alternative versions of that page - for example a button that says "Create Alternative Language Version of This Page." The alternatives would be grouped by the ID.

Possible Operation

There are probably many ways to do this, but one way webhelp could retrieve an appropriate documentation page is as follows:

1. User opens Tiki, navigates to articles, for example, and clicks webhelp.
2. Tiki retrieves:
   1. The feature or section ID - Articles.
   2. The gross Tiki version - let's say 1.8.
   3. The Tiki "preferred help" language - let's say Japanese.
3. Webhelp is passed "fid=articles", "gtv=1.8" and "phl=Japanese", and accesses the document tree on http://doc.tiki.org.
4. Webhelp parses the document tree, finds "articles", that the latest available version class is 1.7, and that there is no Japanese version of the document.
5. Webhelp "degrades" to the next version class down: Articles help documentation, version 1.7, in English.
6. Webhelp displays a message block stating what the user requested and what is available, under which is the "next best" document.

How feasible is the above, programmers?

My Proposal is This...

Proposed by: John Doe
Proposal Date: 27 Jan 04

Lorem Ipsum...