Upcoming UI changes for UNR: Customizing Yelp's Home Page

[Shaun McCance]

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 11:44 -0400, Kyle Nitzsche wrote:
> Just pointing out that coupling the content with the (yelp) viewer 
> imposes real restrictions. For example, how can karmic UNR fork yelp to 
> point to UNR Help Center when that same yelp is used in karmic to point 
> (hard coded) to Ubuntu Help Center (unless changes are made to read the 
> target from gconf or somewhere).

So it could be that the differences in what help you want displayed
can be handled by installing (or not) optional sets of pages that
plug into the desktop help.  I don't know the scope, so I can't
really say for sure.

But otherwise, you're asking for Yelp to display a different document
by default when launched without a URI.  That really is not a big deal.
If you guys want that to be in a GConf key or something so you can make
the customization without patching code, we can do that.  I'm here to
help.  You just have to let me know.

> Given the increasing numbers of distros/images/flavors that consume help 
> content, I think it makes sense to consider a model like this:
>  * single-sourced content that supports inclusion methods (like xinclude 
> and Mallard)

So Mallard is designed with the idea that you can plug pages into
documents.  This is not quite the same thing as pulling pages out
of documents to plug them in elsewhere.  So this isn't something
you're going to get for free just yet.

That said, the modular document structure of Mallard makes remixing
far more feasible than with a book-structured format like DocBook.
We can make this happen.  But what I need is for the writers who
want this stuff to talk to me.

(I've been wanting to put a site up on projectmallard.org where
people can host their own extensions, so we can all experiment
and see what everybody else is experimenting on.  If any web
developer types want to help, that would be awesome.)

>  * converted into multiple delivery formats (x/html, pdf, etc.) (at 
> build time... ?)

To what end?  I'm not trying to say there's no reason to convert
to other formats, but you should have a user goal in mind when
you decide how to go about doing it.  Users are, by and large,
far less interested in documentation than you might think.

>  * displayed by arbitrary viewers
> 
> I think it makes sense to start considering completely uncoupling 
> content from the viewer. Otherwise it is too monolithic.

DocBook and Mallard documentation is in no way tied to Yelp.
They are both open formats, free to be implemented by anybody.
You could write your own DocBook or Mallard viewer.  Heck, I'd
even help you do it.  I've talked to Jim about how I can help
XFCE make their own help viewer.  We're all friends in freedom.

--
Shaun