Zugg Software :: View topic

Wanderer Joined: 06 Jan 2006 Posts: 70

Just wondering perhaps if we might be able to add help file suggestions with newer and more advanced and detailed examples? I've figured out a few things with the functions that aren't too obvious that people may like to look at.

Wizard Joined: 14 Aug 2004 Posts: 1269

It might be an idea to have an "Check for Helpfile updates..." button in CMUD to download the latest updates to help... (I like to consult help off-line at times.)

Posted: Wed Apr 26, 2006 6:50 pm

The help system for CMUD is going to work the way it does for zApp (the DocView demo program). Help will be stored in a database in HTML format and there will get a "Get Updates" button in the help screen to download the latest updates from the web site. The help files will be the same files that we store in the Knowledge Base on this web site. The Knowledge Base can be updated by myself or any other Guru with permission, so it will be easier to update the help and get more examples.

So yes, the help in CMUD will be a great improvement over zMUD help.

The bad news is that none of this will be in the first beta. As usual, the help system has taken a lower priority compared to getting some of the other features working. (sorry Vijilante ;)

SubAdmin Joined: 18 Nov 2001 Posts: 5182

That is very alright with me. My time has been drastically consumed in the past 1 1/2 years keeping up with my day job and just trying to find a small piece of time to relax (yes that means I spend time trying to schedule relaxation). My goal with CMud's beta release's beyond decent beta testing, is to dig out that old wizard I was working on and do enough restructurting and splitting to make a few useful packages for new players. I might even figure out how make that generic stat roller thought that has been lurking in the back of my head, I simply refuse to answer such questions on the forums.

Anyhow, while I like having the help as useful as pratically possible, I am very happy to wait until a system works out that does not involve coordinating, copying, and redoing updates in 2 places.

And finally answeing the first question, this will mean that you can comment on the help through the forums and then changes will be able to be done, with replying comments also readily supplied. As far as I am concerned, it works out to all our benefits.

Wizard Joined: 10 Oct 2000 Posts: 1551 Location: Australia

Talking about forum comments, that was one really useful thing I found with the PHP manual - beyond the initial defintion people would post notes/comments and you could choose to download those, there were a lot of examples/etc posted by user's which made the manual a lot more useful. Having the ability to download the comments along with the helpfile may be something very useful for a future version of CMUD.

You could tie a rating system into it eg people saying "I found this message useful" and have a user-settable threshhold, eg only download comments with 4 or 5 stars.

Posted: Thu Apr 27, 2006 5:17 pm

Yeah, that's something I'll look into. It's a bit tricky because of how the comments for the online knowledge base are stored. The comments get stored in a special "forum". But it certainly should be possible in the future.

Don't know about a rating system though. This stuff is all heavily tied in with the PHPBB and MX Module PHP code, so adding something like that could be a lot more work if it's not already an option in the forums module.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

And this could be something done after the first stable release of CMud comes out to give you a breather and something different to work on.

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 12:39 am

Rating could be done via a poll, no? Polls are normally inbuild into most forumns. Just need a poll for each comment.

Magician Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 459 Location: USA

but polls in phpbb are topic based and not post based... it's been a long time since I've played with a phpbb database, but the work-around for that might be fairly ugly.

Posted: Fri Apr 28, 2006 6:04 am

It doesnt need to be pretty, just effective :)