Those who pay close attention to the changelogs may have already noticed that last week, we added a nice chapter of help pages for the Forum, after adding various additional features there in the weeks before. Since we didn’t go into detail in that weeks blogpost, I wanted to take the opportunity to discuss that change now, as well as some of the behind the scenes work we are doing to improve the manual help pages.
Originally, the help pages were more of a quick reference guide, growing from the desire to showcase the syntax we are using for wikipages, forum posts and various fields. As such, they consist of a long list of options - with a detailed explanation on how to use them. This is very useful when checking how a certain thing had to be done again, but it is not very helpful if you are facing a problem and don’t know how to solve it and not very inviting to explore if you are trying to familiarize yourself with the new system.
Since we’d like RPGpad to be easily accessible, we decided we wanted to add a lot of help pages, not just offering explanations of how things work, but also providing guides to solve common problems we believe people may encounter, including pictures of where buttons are located. Last weeks update to the forums was part of that effort and should give you a good example of what the new help pages will look like.
In order to make support this, we made some substantial changes to the way help pages are handled, giving us more freedom to automatically generate such things as a help index or navigation menu - and automatically keep them up to date. We have since completed this upgrade, but there is one major task left: actually writing all the help pages.
Rather than halting all other development and creating every help page in one go, we will be adding a few new help pages each week, covering different subjects, as we also continue with other developments. Be sure to keep an eye on the changelog for details each week for updates, though this week’s is empty as the new features we are working on haven’t been completed just yet. Also, if there is a specific part of the site you’d like help with first, be sure to let us know, and we’ll make sure to cover that part sooner rather than later!