OpenBand

We needed to display help content on different pages of a Drupal instance, and available solutions did not meet our needs for content management and node association. From this need, Context Help module was born. We originally had a Drupal 4.7 version, but it was not very scalable and became annoying to the users who did not like the “tooltip pop-up” format we had used.

Resolved to improve the module’s experience and performance, we decided on a completely new approach utilizing the Drupal CMS and the numerous advantages afforded to it by CCK and Views. We made each of the help topics a node that could be retrieved via Views. We found a number of advantages to this approach:

1. Easily create, update and customize site help content.
2. Easy access to the display view allows more accessibility for more developers.
3. Help can be formatted using thick editors such as TinyMCE or FCKEditor.

This is a first version of the module for Drupal 6 and provides the features and additions developers in the Drupal community haven’t found in other solutions. The features of Context Help include

1. Import and Export capability for help content nodes utilizing an XML format.
2. Supporting full translation so help can be available in different languages.
3. Ability to support Frequently Answered Questions in the help page display.
4. Ability to browse all available help in the system based on the users’ language preferences.
5. Configuration via administration screen to determine what is available in the popup. Options include help for the Current Page, for All Pages and FAQs.

As we prepare Context Help for a full release we encourage any ideas from others regarding improvements, features, or support requests.