The Advanced Help module provides a framework that allows module and theme developers to provide hierarchical pages with help topics.
It differs from the core Help module by allowing for multiple help topics, and by separating help text from code, instead placing it in separate .html and/or .md-files. These separate help files may be included in the repo and distributed along with the module or theme project.
The help topics can be placed in an hierarchical book, allowing for top-down navigation.
The help topics can be easily translated simply by copying them into the right translations directory.
The advanced help framework ties into Drupal's search system and can be set to be fully indexed. [This is not yet upgraded to Drupal 9/10.]
Help topics may include images. See “Image examples” is the Advanced Help Example submodule for examples.
If there is a README.md or README.txt in the repo, the content of that file may be shown as well.
Installation
You must use composer to install the 8.x-1.x branch of the project. To see the exact command line see "Install:" under "Releases" near the bottom of this page. (Please note that you cannot use ludwig as a replacement for composer to install this module.
Roadmap
This project is the most used extension for creating on screen help within a Drupal site. Where is it headed?
It has been suggested to create core help-features based upon those provided by Advanced Help. See these issues for background:
- [#402404]
- [#2592487]
However, eventually another route was picked for Drupal version 8 and later, see next section.
While keeping an eye on these efforts, until further notice, the current team will continue to maintain and develop Advanced Help for all supported versions of Drupal. Full releases for Drupal 7 and Drupal 9 exists. For Drupal 10 there is a tagged alpha release.
When the core framework for creating contextual in-line help and help topics becomes stable, the future of this project will be re-evaluated. If the features provided by a future release of the core is suited replace this project, it will be retired. Hopefully, we shall be able to create some tool to merge existing help texts into such a core framework.
Drupal 98 and later: Help Topics and Tour
- Help Topics is an experimental module intended to replace
hook_help. - The core Tour module provides in-line help by means of tooltips. The core Views module makes use of this to provide context sensitive help.
Text format
In order for images to display properly, the next tagged release will use the "Full HTML" text filter for rendering HTML help pages. The documentation about Configuring text formats for security says that "you should only allow 'Full HTML' for registered users that you trust". I.e. only a trusted administrator should be allowed to install and edit help pages based upon this module. For discussion about this, please see this issue: [#3299789].
Known problems
This module is incompatible with the Fast 404 module. Installing Fast 404 will produce 404 (File not found) errors if you try to look up README.txt-files. See this issue [#2039371] for more information.