[LON-CAPA-dev] Help text

[Gerd Kortemeyer]

Hmm ...

I actually had the following idea a little while ago:

We will put new headers on the admin pages anyway, so there will be a
header-producing routine in lonnet. It will look something like this:

$r->print(&Apache::lonnet::pageheader('Spreadsheet','grading'));

and puts up the correct role header. For "advanced" users, it also produces a
"Help" and a "Bug" link.

These do not go to a third all-new structure, but just go a the FAQ and
Bugzilla. There is a table in the system like this

grading    134    Instructor+Interface

which means that these links will go to

http://help.loncapa.org/fom/cache/134.html
http://bugs.lon-capa.org/buglist.cgi?component=Instructor+Interface

- Gerd.

Scott Harrison wrote:

> Dear Matthew:
>
> > Well, I doubt there will be so many help pages at first that we cannot
> > easily add in any tags needed for indexing.  I think it is more valuable
> > at this time to actually have help pages.  What metadata do these pages
> > need to have in order to be indexed automagically?
>
> The only "metadata" would be title and hierarchy.
> The target directory location would be the hierarchy... (maybe we don't
> want a hierarchy, but anyways...) for instance:
> + Instructor Tools
>   + Spreadsheet
>   + Plotting equations
>   + RAT
>   + Class lists
> + General information
>   + Remote control
>   + Roles
>   + Answering Problems
>
> (And of course, this should be in sync ... and draw from ...
>  help.lon-capa.org).
>
> And then, students may not want to be bothered with instructor
> tools...
>
> >
> > >(Ideally, the interface help pages would streamline nicely
> > >down the vertical partition toward the actual documented
> > >code base.  But...priorities...priorities..)
> > I have no idea what that means :)
> >
>
> Pressman, Rumbaugh, etc; a lot of standard books on
> software engineering talk about horizontal layers
> and vertical partions.
>
> Horizontal layers "make sense of the system".
> That is to say, they are the levels of computer services
> that exist.
>
> For example,
>
> ---------- LON-CAPA web interface ------------------------
> ------------- Apache::* libraries ------------------------
> ---------------- mod_perl --------------------------------
> ----------------- apache ---------------------------------
> -- shared libraries (including CPAN libraries) -----------
> ----------------- kernel ---------------------------------
>
> Contrastingly, vertical partitions are how the software
> design proceeds across the horizontal layers to provide
> user services.
>
> So, restated, ideally, there would be a clear path from each
> LON-CAPA interface to the source code documentation
> that was involved in presenting and processing information
> from that interface.
>
> Testing might ask, horizontally:
> * are all the kernel and shared libraries present that
>   need to be present
> * is the web server running in the right configuration?
> * mod_perl, is it working?
> * are all the CPAN libraries present?
>
> Vertical partitions might ask, testing-wise,
> is the metadata database interface working
> and what is all the source code involved with it?
>
> The testing strategy that I have been trying to find
> time to implement is:
>
> Horizontal layer testing in:
> loncom/build/system_dependencies
>
> Vertical partition testing in:
> loncom/build/weblayer_test
>
> Anecdotally...
>
>     we are all part of the matrix. :)
>
> The blue pill or the red pill?
>
> Regards,
> Scott
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