[Zope-CMF] CMF User Help

[Carl Rendell]

Jim,

I just went through this exercise for on of our sites as as a part, 
I reviewed quite a few help systems including that which is 
distributed for the Zope Management Interface.

My personal conclusions coincide with one of your observations.. 
each implementation of CMF is unique, and as a result the help 
systems could be very different from one that was distributed with 
CMF.

For the system I implemented I cam up with the following criteria:

   - Separate Help Window

   - Subject matter 'keyed' to form

   - Search of help documents

   - Easy Maintainence (TTW)

   - Distributeable/Upgradeable (download and install)

To these help features, I added some that I thought were important 
to the Zope/CMF envrionmenet to which they would be applied. Namely:

   - Integrates with CMF (installes in CMF space)

   - User editable (post install)

This resulted in an implementation where basic help documents are 
created for every form on the site. The documents are distributed 
as part of a product set implementation, and are added to the CMF 
Site programmatically via an install script (external method) along 
with skins to support the feature set described above.

All of this works really well, allows users to 'extend' the help 
documents because they are created as objects in the ZODB, and 
leverages the standard set of tool provided by Zope and the CMF.

So... that's the basics of the solution I've implemented. Of course 
there are many other way's to skin the cat.

~C

On Monday, July 1, 2002, at 03:41  PM, zope-cmf-request@zope.org wrote:

> Message: 7
> From: Jim Pharis <jpharis@rtl.org>
> To: zope-cmf@zope.org
> Date: 01 Jul 2002 15:15:02 -0400
> Subject: [Zope-CMF] CMF User Help
>
> CMF People,
>
> I was curious if anybody has thought about creating a generic help
> system for users of a CMF site. Would a help system be 
> inappropriate for
> CMF? Since there so many different ways CMF could be implemented 
> is this
> the reason that there is none.
>
> I was just wondering because I am currently working on an implantation
> of CMF for my company and finding myself writing alot of documentation
> on CMF for the users to do things such as navigate and how to use Local
> Roles.
>
> Im curious if a help system has purposely been left out or if it is
> something that just hasn't been done yet?
>
> Jim Pharis

Carl E. Rendell
Solution43
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