Versioned docs

[Steve Dodier-Lazaro]

I totally +1 that. Unexperienced users' first interaction with a confusing
UI would probably be to go to the help button. If that fails them or tells
them something confusing or unactionable (because it refers to a previous
version of the app), they will be too deterred to even report bugs.

On 16 February 2015 at 23:33, Simon Steinbeiß <simon at xfce.org> wrote:

> Hey everyone,
>
> since the release date is creeping up on us, I quickly want to highlight a
> feature libxfce4ui has gained during this cycle and that is support for
> versioned docs. What this means is that if a user clicks "Help" in your
> app/component they will be redirected to the corresponding version of the
> docs online. This will help us account for differences without abandoning
> previous documentation.
>
> Two parts of core already use this for a while – xfdesktop4.11 and
> xfce4-power-manager1.4 – so you can test those to see how things should
> work. I pushed support for this to xfce4-settings as well [1], as there are
> some quite visible and drastic changes e.g. in xfce4-display-settings that
> warrant a doc refresh.
>
> From my point of view, all of our components should support this. Of
> course, this initially means that if you wanna do a major version bump, the
> Help button will point to a non-existing page in the docs-wiki. However,
> the simple fix is to copy-paste the content of older docs over and then to
> incrementally improve/adjust those to fit the new version. (Obviously using
> less screenshots makes this process less laborious.)
>
> Anyway, it's fairly easy to add this in, so please go ahead and ahead of
> 4.12. While this means that until the release, the Help links will point to
> the void of a non-existing 4.11 page, it might be a good incentive for
> people to help us with documentation ;)
>
> Cheers
> Simon
>
>
> PS: Another procedural remark: the main page of the docs should always
> point to the latest stable version of the component, so until 4.12 is
> released, http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfdesktop/start should point to the
> 4.10 docs. After the 4.12 release, that page should be moved to
> http://docs.xfce.org/xfce/xfdesktop/4.10/start to make space for the
> refreshed docs.
>
>
> [1]
> http://git.xfce.org/xfce/xfce4-settings/commit/?id=ca5c4aed4525c12935a8e61dbb0f2e0509e50c6a
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-- 
Steve Dodier-Lazaro
PhD Student
University College London
Free Software Developer
OpenPGP : 1B6B1670
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