I don't mind creating wiki pages for the missing items if someone can point out what needs to be created.
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 22 May 2020 14:19:48 +0100
From: Michael Tremer michael.tremer@ipfire.org
To: Jonatan Schlag jonatan.schlag@ipfire.org
Cc: Jon Murphy jcmurphy26@gmail.com, "IPFire: Development-List"
development@lists.ipfire.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Help for GUI
Message-ID: B1130640-0C7D-4CCF-9F32-34751B90E8B3@ipfire.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Hey,
On 21 May 2020, at 19:51, Jonatan Schlag jonatan.schlag@ipfire.org wrote:
Hi,
16.05.2020, 11:28 -0500 Jon Murphy:
My opinion: This encourages people to look at the wiki and gets them
pointed in the right direction. This is much better than a new user
firing off a quick question to the Community. Most anything that is
encourages people to get interested in IPFire is a good thing.
I do not know if it will encourage people, but if a person wants to
learn to find the starting point for a certain topic, is much easier.
There are very few people that will read the whole wiki from the
start (not sure how many wiki pages?). Especially reading something
that is technically difficult.
I think nobody requests or requested that everybody have to read the
full wiki. From my experiences, it is just better to read and learn
before doing things. Try and error is also ok, but then nobody should
expecting that somebody helps, when they get into trouble. There is
also a learning effect in finding the solutions on yourself.
I suggested that. People cannot start somewhere in the middle.
You will have to learn how to set up a network somewhere from the start. Ironing out mistakes is getting more difficult the larger it grows. Plenty of companies therefore struggle with their technological debt.
I am not suggesting that reading our wiki will prevent you from making those mistakes, but it is at least a place where you will learn how to avoid making some of them. And that won?t fit into only a single paragraph.
I also see your point that people might not read stuff that is
technically
difficult or hard to understand, but sometimes there is no way to avoid
this. Learning new things can be hard and sometimes you have to read.
Even links to the right wiki page will change nothing concerning the
need that some people have to read a lot. The only thing that gets
improved is that people have not to find the right place to start. They
will have to read not more and not less.
I?ll use myself as an example. Right now I am trying to learn a
little about SIP and Asterisks and FreePBX. I tried reading various
pages of Asterisks (or FreePBX) and it is over my head. So I try a
few things on my Asterisks box, watch a video, read a little, try
some thing than rinse & repeat. (And Yes I realize asterisks is not
the same as IPFire).
This is a completely different thing though.
I sometimes bake things. Literally nothing can go wrong there. It is not dangerous, it won?t cost me a fortune when I lose customer data (as a company) and so on.
Security is so invisible and so difficult to understand for many and that is what makes the difference for me.
I did the same with IPFire (and IPCop) many years ago. It works very
well for me.
Anything that makes it super easy to find a way to the wiki is a good
thing!
From: Jon Murphy
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2020, 11:10 AM
To: development-request@lists.ipfire.org,
development@lists.ipfire.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Help for GUI
Oops? maybe my bad?
Message: 3
Date: Sat, 16 May 2020 10:35:00 +0100
From: Michael Tremer michael.tremer@ipfire.org
To: Tim FitzGeorge ipfr@tfitzgeorge.me.uk
Cc: development@lists.ipfire.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] Help for GUI
Message-ID: 6390F8AE-998D-489E-A983-1A875E2761F2@ipfire.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Hi Tim,
Thank you very much for submitting these patches.
I am afraid that I must say that I oppose these changes.
This has recently been discussed on the community portal and
although I still have not made my mind up entirely, I think this
not helpful to anyone:
- We do not have documentation for everything for a start
So a few pages are missing, but from my point of view, it is better to
have a context-sensitive help for 90% of the pages as for 0%.
- There is never this ?just read one sentence and you suddenly
will be an expert? thing this kind of promotes
Should we not rather link the wiki somewhere in the footer and
encourage people to start reading the whole thing from the start
before they do something?
I do not think that this promotes this. Maybe, but theses people then
did not understand how things are working. Like written above, the need
to read and also the amount people have to read will not change. When
they do not understand this, I currently have no idea how to solve this
issue.
The real improvement I see here is, that people find the right entry
point to the wiki. They're also people who have a lot of knowledge and
for them, a link to the corresponding wiki site is a usability
improvement. Context-Sensitive Help is a nice feature for all people
who know how to use it. People who know, when they did not understand
the page where they were redirected, that they have to read more. Or
that they have to understand more of the context/technologie/ whatever.
So to sum up what I try to explain:
We should accept features which improving the usability for a lot of
people. We should not drop these features because some people have a
way to learn which does not work. We will not change these people,
whatever we will do. So I vote to accept this improvement, but I still
have some questions left.
@Tim could you send a Screenshot how this will look? I cannot imagine
such things from code
@Michael:
I also like the Idea that the wiki is linked in the footer.
The guys at nextcloud have something like this:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/5169868/58201395-fa749000-7ca2-11e...
Maybe we could create a website similar and pointing the users to right
directions in the web interface itself?
Yes, we could do something like this.
-Michael
Greetings Jonatan
What is your rationale to implementing this?
Best,
-Michael
On 15 May 2020, at 22:39, Tim FitzGeorge <
ipfr@tfitzgeorge.me.uk> wrote:
Add per-page help link to GUI.
The link is extracted from the menu file and added to the menu.
Currently only implemented for 'ipfire' and 'ipfire-rounded'
themes.
Tim FitzGeorge (3):
Help for GUI - ipfire theme code
Help for GUI - Help links
Help for GUI - help link style
config/menu/10-system.menu | 11 +++++++
config/menu/20-status.menu | 13 ++++++++
config/menu/30-network.menu | 20 +++++++++--
config/menu/40-services.menu | 6 ++++
config/menu/50-firewall.menu | 8 ++++-
config/menu/60-ipfire.menu | 1 +
config/menu/70-log.menu | 33
++++++++++++-------
config/menu/EX-apcupsd.menu | 1 +
config/menu/EX-guardian.menu | 1 +
config/menu/EX-mpfire.menu | 1 +
config/menu/EX-samba.menu | 1 +
config/menu/EX-tor.menu | 1 +
config/menu/EX-wlanap.menu | 1 +
html/html/themes/ipfire/include/css/style.css | 8 +++++
html/html/themes/ipfire/include/functions.pl | 19 +++++++++--
15 files changed, 107 insertions(+), 18 deletions(-)
--
2.26.1
Jon Murphy