Navigating the online documentation

Author Message

mikael lindqvist

Monday 01 September 2003 2:14:37 pm

I believe the documentation structure is too detailed in terms of an overhelming amount of sub-sections. It's good to classify documents correctly but you also need to keep in mind that the user normally is not too clear about what he is looking for and allowing him to easy scroll through current documentation is preferable.

I therefor suggest that you try to make a more userfriendly navigation through your online documentations (it's really annoying to "drill-down" endless subsections to finally find out that the document you were looking for is half-finished and pointing to other half-empty files).

Kindly,
Mikael

Paul Forsyth

Tuesday 02 September 2003 12:17:41 am

Mikael,

Again we spoke about this at the conference. I totally agree with you that navigation for the documentation must be improved. I use mozilla so i can afford to open tabs for lots of the links while i search for what i need, but i know that isn't for everyone :)

Besides a better way of linking good articles to what people need there will be a better front page, much like what you see with ez.no/sdk. Hopefully the search facilities within the doc section will be specific to docs...

I think we will start to see changes in around 2 weeks time when people are back from holidays.

Paul

Jakob Vad Nielsen

Tuesday 02 September 2003 1:13:12 am

Bård also talked about some PDF versions of the documentation I think. People do often feel more confident reading from page 1 to n.

Jeroen van Gorkum

Wednesday 10 September 2003 10:36:19 am

``I believe the documentation structure is too detailed in terms of an overhelming amount of sub-sections.''

i totally agree with this; even with tabbed browsing, i get lost every time in these submenus.

suggestion: i'd personally prefer not more than 1 sublevel in the documentation; so all the pages under .../customization/ are listed (& linked) on the Customization page, divided into labeled lists. the labels can be taken from the current sublevels of that page. sublevels below that are too detailed anyway, and pages from these levels could be moved up one level.

it will still be overwhelming this way, but you'd at least have a better overview what is available in one place.

jeroen.

Dennis Howard

Friday 07 November 2003 1:15:23 am

This really helped me a lot, so can this be included in the online documentation to help other users.

Fetch Function
The fetch function is a very useful template function, but unfortunately it's (up to now) very poorly documented. An example of using it is shown in Template Language (3.x). But this page will try to explain the details.

fetch( <module>, <function>, <parameters> )

It takes 3 arguments:

<module> (string)
<function> (string)
<parameters> (associative array)
The function and its parameters are defined in [module]/function_definition.php.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Module: content
Functions: list, list_count, tree, tree_count, node
Parameters:

parent_node_id [integer]
node_id [integer] (only for function 'node')
sort_by [array] default: false
first array field is the field to sort:
"class_identifier"
"class_name"
"depth"
"modified"
"name"
"path"
"priority"
"published"
"section"
second array field is the order:
"true()" -> ascending
"false()" -> descending
offset [integer] default: false
limit [integer] default: false
depth [integer] default: 1
class_id [integer] default: false unused?
class_filter_type [string] default: false
"include"
"exclude"
class_filter_array [array] default: false
list of class ids
Examples:

Fetching subnodes of parent node 5, but only of class ids 2 (e.g. categories):

fetch( 'content', 'list', hash(parent_node_id, 5, class_filter_type, "include", class_filter_array, array(2))

Fetching node with node_id 23:

fetch( 'content', 'node', hash(node_id, 23))

Fetching subnodes of parent node 10 and sorting ascending by name:

fetch( 'content', 'list', hash(parent_node_id, 10, "sort_by", array("name", true())))

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