[Rosegarden-user] Manual ported to the wiki; new help system

[D. M. M. <mic...@ro...>]

The initial conversion went OK, so the Rosegarden Manual (formerly the 
Handbook) is on the wiki now for good.  This means the help system will 
require an internet connection to function, which is a slight problem, but I 
think the enhanced maintainability makes it worth it in the long run.

The next phase of work is to fix Rosegarden's help system to replace all the 
empty menus and buttons that don't do anything with links to the online help 
system.  This is a slog that's heavy on tedium and very light on code, and I 
could use a lot of help getting this done if we want it finished before 
February.  This is a great project for anybody with a little time to spare, 
and an interest in helping out with Rosegarden.

I have a road map document here:

http://rosegardenmusic.com/wiki/doc:roadmap

In this phase, we need to go through the code and find all the 
QDialogButtonBox that have a Help button that doesn't do anything, and fix 
them.  We should also add any missing Help buttons along the way, unless the 
dialog is extremely trivial.

Once the dialog-specific help is pulled out of the main manual 
(http://rosegardenmusic.com/wiki/doc:manual-en) we'll move on to the major 
editors; for example, pulling the notation-related dialogs together into a 
page that will be accessed from the notation view's help menu.  After the 
editors are complete, the rest of it should be "main window help" or close 
enough, and then we'll turn the main entry page into a table of contents 
linking to all the other pages of links to other pages.  Initially, we'll just 
recycle old content with minimal editing, and eventually we should fill in all 
the gaps, providing pages for all the assorted sundry things for which there 
never has been any proper help. In the long run, I want to fold most of the 
old Rosegarden Companion into this as well, making it a combination manual and 
tutorial.

We can release with the docs in a sorry state (every other project does) so 
the most important single thing is getting all the code work done up front.  
It's very easy code work, and again, this is a great opportunity for anybody 
who can use a text editor and who understands the simplest things about code 
(change "PresetHandlerDialog" to "MidiFilterDialog" and paste this here and 
that there, and you're done.  It's very formulaic and straightforward, but not 
quite scriptable.)

If there are any takers, we should figure out a way to coordinate and avoid 
duplicating effort.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre