Club Drupal

Synopsis

The Advanced help module provides a framework that allows module and theme developers integrate help texts in a Drupal site.

These help texts are stored in ordinary .html-files that lives in the file system (as opposed to the database). These files are distributed from the project Drupal.org repo in the same package as the module or theme, and placed in a subdirectory named help in the project or theme directory. This means that the help texts can be easiely kept in sync with the project they provide help texts for, but also that read access to these files are not managed by any content access restrictions imposed by Drupal.

The help texts can be marked up with standard HTML. They will be rendered using your site's theme.

If the module or theme author does not make use of the Advanced help HTML-framework, but if there is a README.md or README.txt in the package, the content of that file will be shown instead.

The help texts may appear in a popup or not as the project prefers. By taking away access to view the popups, a site can hide popups from users.

The help texts can be placed in a hierarchy, allowing for top down navigation of help.

The help texts may be made searchable. If advanced help search is enabled, all help texts are fully indexed. This means that the entire contents of the advanced help set of pages can be searched for keywords.

Using the module

When you enable the module, a new tab with the legend “Advanced help” will show up under “Help”:

By itself, this module doesn't do much. The Advanced help assists other modules and themes in showing help texts. Nothing will show up until you enable at least one other module that makes use of the advanced help framework or comes with a file named README.md or README.txt. However, it comes with a small companion demo module named Advanced help example to demonstrate how it works. For more extensive example of use of the advanced help features, see the Views project.

Support status

Reported bugs for the Drupal 7 branch will be fixed in a timely manner. Bugs in the issue queue for the Drupal 6 branch will only be fixed if accompanied with a patch, after the patch has been reviewed and tested by the community. No Drupal 8 version is currently under development. Post a message in the issue queue if you're interested in managing a port of the project to to Drupal 8. Older versions are no longer supported.

Community support in the form of patches are very welcome for both Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 versions, and will be given priority. For QA, the project needs community support in the form of reviews of patches, development versions and releases.

The primary goal of the module is to remain light-weight and simple. This means that not all feature requests will be implemented, even if they are a good idea. Feature requests accompanied by patches are more likely to make it into a release.

The maintainer hopes that the community is willing to help out by answering & closing support requests.

Credits

• merlinofchaos (52 commits, original creator)
• redndahead (8 commits)
• dmitrig01 (3 commits)
• amitgoyal (5 commits)
• gisle (current maintainer, D7)
• gnuget (current maintainer, D8)