Proposal: Add Help Button to toolbar by default

[NicolaiRidani]

Hi everybody,

I have created a quick feature proposal. I would appreciate your feedback.

Situation

The django CMS toolbar does not provide any sort of help button. As a user, I have to switch to my browser and search in Google for support or go directly to www.django-cms.org.

Solution

Add a default help button to the django CMS toolbar that provides information about the various django CMS support resources (link to documentation, details about forum and Slack etc.)

Mock up 1

BTW: The links in the drop down are not set in stone obviously...something we can work out together

Mock up 2

What do you think? Which mock up do you prefer? Do you have other ideas?

[mahmudft]

Mock Up 1 looks great

[marksweb]

I quite like this idea with mockup 1 being the way I'd go about it 👍

[marksweb]

I found myself with some time tonight waiting for the kids to sleep & have had a go at how it could work;

marksweb@2182857

Only issues I had was adding target="_blank" to the links in the menu didn't open new tabs/windows so links would open in the same window currently. This is likely an issue with the way the toolbar is rendered in the page.

[NicolaiRidani]

Adding Nicolas' feedback from Slack to this discussion:

Just my 0.02$! I'm not a 100% sure if I want that Help section there for my end users (the content editors) because most of the questions they've got are very content and project related. So the majority of users that use the CMS (not the admins) should not be redirected to open community support but to the project support. So I would appreciate if that help section can be toggled on or off for certain user groups.

I think making it easy to switch off makes absolutely sense. @evildmp also suggested in today's weekly Tech Committee meeting that the help section could also be amended by adding help information / project support details of the project owner.

[marksweb]

Funny those things should come up @NicolaiRidani

In that initial approach I added, the toolbar can be turned off be a setting and you can change what appears in it.

If we wanted to ensure some cms links were there & there was an option for people to add others then that'd also be fairly simple to do 👍

To provide some detail here as to what my branch contains, I'd added the settings;

    'ENABLE_HELP': True,  # Adds help menu toolbar
    'HELP_MENU_ITEMS': (
        (_('Community forum'), 'https://discourse.django-cms.org/'),
        (_('Documentation'), 'https://docs.django-cms.org/en/latest/'),
        (_('Getting started'), 'https://www.django-cms.org/en/get-started-django-cms/'),
        (_('Talk to us'), 'https://www.django-cms.org/en/support/'),
    )
}

Then the menu is added if it's enabled and populated with the contents of that HELP_MENU_ITEMS setting;

    def add_help_menu(self):
        """ Adds the help menu if it's enabled in settings """
        if get_cms_setting('ENABLE_HELP'):
            self._help_menu = self.toolbar.get_or_create_menu(HELP_MENU_IDENTIFIER, _('Help'), position=-1)
            menu_items = get_cms_setting('HELP_MENU_ITEMS')
            for label, url in menu_items:
                self._help_menu.add_link_item(label, url=url)

This was a simple initial implementation to demo what it might do, but we could make the menu content a bit more advanced - having links we enforce and optional user provided links etc.

[goutnet]

Should we create an issue for this? (and add it to a milestone?)

[marksweb]

Yeah that could be a good move. I could create a draft PR against it from what I've done so far, then hopefully get some feedback on things.

[NicolaiRidani]

Links to be included by default:

• Getting started developer guide (link: https://docs.django-cms.org/en/latest/introduction/index.html)
• Documentation (link: https://docs.django-cms.org/en/latest/index.html)
• Support Forum (link: https://discourse.django-cms.org/)
• Support Slack (link: https://www.django-cms.org/slack)
• What's new (link: https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/)

I would also like to add a "Getting Started User Guide" in the future once the tutorial is completed.

What do you think of the link (+labels)?

[marksweb]

Yeah that works 👍

Will put in place when I get chance