[dev] Hiding Help entries

[John Morrissey]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 05:55:08PM +0100, Jan Schneider wrote:
> Zitat von John Morrissey <jwm at horde.net>:
> > It would be nice to automatically hide Help entries if the corresponding
> > functionality/preference is disabled. For example, we disable PGP and
> > S/MIME support for our users by disabling and locking the preference.
> >
> > What would be the best way to implement this? Maybe something like:
> >
> > <depends on="prefName">
> >   <entry id="foo">
> >     <!-- [...] -->
> >   </entry>
> > </depends>
> >
> > This would also be useful if you want to hide parts of a Help entry
> > based on prefs or configuration, for example:
> >
> > <entry id="foo">
> >   <para>Foo does cool stuff.</para>
> >
> >   <depends on="pgp">
> >     <para>You can encrypt your cool stuff.</para>
> >   </depends>
> > </entry>
> >
> > If prefName is disabled (and locked?), Help:: will ignore this
> > entry/section at parse time.
> >
> > Would Help entries need to be disabled based on something other than
> > preferences? conf.php settings?
> 
> While this makes sense, it adds a huge overhead to the help system. We
> currently don't need any authentication or even configuration or loaded
> preferences to show the help.

Any further thoughts on this, anyone? For now, I've commented out the
relevant portions of help.xml in my local installations.

I understand Jan's point about the overhead of having loaded configuration
and prefs to display help, but something nags at me that it's really
confusing for users to see things in Help, but not be able to find them in
the UI.

john
-- 
John Morrissey          _o            /\         ----  __o
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