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