Agile Web Development

The HelpEngine lets you manage and place context sensitive help links within your application without worrying about the underlying implementation.

For instance, many applications needs to provide help links next to form fields defining the rules of that field or the field description. Instead of doing something clunky, like manually building a link that pops up hard-coded help text, you can use the HelpEngine to manage all of this for you. Here is a basic example of what the help engine provides:

  <%= link_to_help('help.user_form.login') %>

That one link will create a link that displays a div with the helper text for the ‘help.user_form.login’ key pulled from the database. If you need to change the body of the help text, the administrator can open up the help administration page and update the text instead of having to go into the view code to modify its value.

It’s important to recognize as well that the help engine is actually a generic way to pull key/values from the database and visually present them to the user – it does not have to be used solely for application ‘help’.

HelpEngine is versatile – it works for a single help box for defining technical terms, or for multiple boxes providing personal comments. HelpEngine is easy to use and requires no technical knowledge to update the help messages. Pictures and links can be used in the HTML-friendly help messages, and the help boxes even come with their own div tags for CSS.

Home: http://rails-engines.org/wiki/pages/HelpEngine

Repository: svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/helpengine

License:

Category: Rails Engines