One of the improvements that has been mentioned is an extension of the “Help” for plugins beyond Gramplets. So the help_url will be a feature for all Plugins. One benefit is that the Available Gramps Updates for Addons dialog (the Addon Manager) could let you visit the feature’s documentation, before you have to choose which to install or skip.
And since some features don’t have a dialog where a button could be mounted, universal access to Help for plug-ins could be added to the Plugin Manager… Specifically for Tools or Reports, the right panel could have a Help for the right detail panel or in the Info dialog for the selected plugin.
The access to Help for both built-in and add-on Gramplets is hidden… unless the gramplet is unlocked/detached. Then a Help button appears for the floating dialog.
The capture above includes dialogs from the Plugin Manager Enhanced addon. But the Detailed Info Dialog from the original Plugin Manager is a bit more formatted… but that sacrifices a significant amount of screen space:
Maybe there could be a disussion about consolidating all these features into a single framework. The Report/Tool selector seems to have the cleanest GUI to build upon.
The new Addons Manager will include a few new features:
A help url for every addon.
An enhanced status category with possible values: Unstable, Experimental, Beta, Stable.
A new audience category with possible values: Everyone, Developer, Expert.
Maintainer names and email addresses. This allows for a maintainers to be different from the authors.
Requirements lists. This will allow us to check the prerequisites prior to installation. In some limited cases it may be possible to install missing modules.
Access third-party repositories such as the Isotammi addons.
Filters to enable the user to find an addon easily.
The new user interface is heavily influenced by Matthias Kemmer’s addon listings web page.
I’ll try to get it finished tomorrow. I think that I have managed to incorporate all the suggestions I had from the feedback so far.
You’ve probably already tweaked the master to add help_url registrations for each addon.
But the sample .gpr.py files (like the GlockGramplet) are not marked as translatable.
Do the new registrations have the new URLs set as translatable? Will translators be able to set URLs so speakers of other languages will be able to take advantage of Help?
Another would also be nice if we can set to a local/relative URI to take advantage of Readme.md files (locally or in the GitHub addon-source
And will we be able to change the base URL away from the pre-defined https://gramps-project.org/wiki/ root? As the user recently requested (see quote below), being able to oint to a cache of downloaded webpages would (for the ‘first click’ anyway) give an offline alternative. (Although saving an offline copy of the main wikipages will probably resolve the interpage mediawiki links back to the Gramps-project.org domain rather than the cache. So second clicks will try to hit the net again.)
The Reports links might be a better example to explore.
The main Report wiki page had to be padded out with section titles for all the 3rd party addons. The report dialogs Help button goes to the URL of the main page followed by a hashtag and the name of the report – regardless of the report being a built-in or add-on.
Even though it jumps directly to the subsection for the specific report, it is less confusing if the table of contents looks like the menu the user just navigated. So, the header Anchors have to be inserted in the same subgroupings, case-sensitive naming and alphabetical order as the menus.
And naturally, the Translated version of the Reports have translated Report names which means they can have different ordering in the menus and the translated wiki pages. (Giving the open nature of the wiki editing, there is little chance that we can make everyone aware of the need for continuity with English language anchor to augment the translated subheading.)
Which creates another maintenance and harmonization frequent failure point. It also violates the objective of avoiding sections that link outside the main chapter wiki pages — except See Also pages or or external links.
And the Tool dialogs has a different approach. (So the main Tools wiki page table of contents does not reflect the menu populated with add-ons.) Those buttons actually branch to a specific webpage. (Even though only some tools have UI dialogs. The others don’t have the possibility of Help buttons.)
The other types of add-on each approaches Help access differently.