Help screens

[Webdongle]

Most of the Help screens in Joomla Docs just explain how to navigate to the screen and repeat the contextual help. There is rarely any full explanation of of the fields.

[brian]

Well you know how to fix that

[Webdongle]

No I don't because I don't know how to word a definition. You can see by my posts that, although I help find problems, I learn as much as I help. The wiki needs someone of your calibre to explain something clearly.

[brian]

Thank you for volunteering me

[sozzled]

There are some incredibly long discussions at GitHub about contextual help. One example is at https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/discussions/35594

JDOCS complements the source code but it's not necessarily any better at explaining how J! is supposed to work than what we're able to understand from reading the detailed technical discussions at GitHub. I don't know what else I can add to this discussion except to say that it's unhelpful to dismiss questions with supercilious put-downs such as "if you don't like it, change it."

I've contributed a few changes to JDOCS over the years; sometimes I've improved things and sometimes I haven't been quite as successful. I don't have enough hours in my day to rewrite everything I don't like at JDOCS. I use JDOCS as a reference tool; it's as good as any other reference tool that people could use but I know it's not 100% reliable. For those times when JDOCS lets me down, there are discussion forums (like this one, GitHub and StackIdeas and others) that fill in the gaps.

[ceford]

Having worked on both Help screens and Tutorials (and jdocs.joomla.org) I feel overwhelmed by the weight of accumulated documents going back to 1.5. I think the Toggle Inline Help feature in the Global Configuration screen is a great step forward. With that in place everywhere the Help screens could become more like tutorials than references. I have been working through a list of J4 tutorials recently: https://docs.joomla.org/J4.x:Doc_Pages but there is still a long way to go. Maybe one day some will replace Help screens or link from them.

[Webdongle]

The fact that some tool tips are little help is not the problem they can always be improved. The problem is they are removed that is a backward step.