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opencredit / badgeos

BadgeOS is a plugin to WordPress that allows you to easily create badges and set up the steps and achievements users take to earn them. Badges are Mozilla OBI compatible and sharable via Credly.
http://www.badgeos.org
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
92 stars 64 forks source link

Clean up and enhance help page #214

Open tw2113 opened 10 years ago

tw2113 commented 10 years ago

It's pretty bland and boring at the moment, how could we make it better and more user friendly?

tw2113 commented 10 years ago

So, I've been thinking about this last night and today. Our help page is just kind of there. We have some quick blurbs about BadgeOS, a small paragraph with support channel links, and then a bunch of shortcode info with parameters and quick examples.

I think there's a lot of room to embellish this area. One of my main thoughts is set up the page to have tabbed sections. First tab could be the "About BadgeOS" and quick links to support areas. The rest of the tabs I'd love to pull in content from badgeos.org/developers/. I'm not sure how many people even realize that resource is there and available, and would benefit more by having it available from right in their WP Admin dashboard.

I can see at least 3 tabs focused on specific developer content: shortcodes, hooks, and metadata. This could come straight from the developers page. In the process of copying this content over from badgeos.org, we could also revise/update the content as necessary as I don't know it has been for the past couple major releases.

a 5th tab that I think could be beneficial would be more indepth tutorials/FAQs for doing various things with one's BadgeOS install. Hopefully with this, we could perhaps take care of some more general/common questions that come up on the forums, and deal more with actual potential bugs there.

tw2113 commented 10 years ago

Originally from Brian:

This sounds like a great area to improve for 1.5.0.

I think rather than creating three tabs just for developers, we could make better use of a single "Developers" tab. And rather than duplicate the content into the plugin we should instead link directly to it. It's better to point everyone to a single source, rather than have multiple sources, and it will save us the trouble of duplicating the content and maintaining it in two separate locations (and also the trouble of unnecessarily building some means to scrape the content from the site to embed in the page live).

Here are some examples from the community:

BadgeOS (included for reference): http://d.pr/i/a46x http://d.pr/i/a0Ws http://d.pr/i/RNuW http://d.pr/i/dYK6 http://d.pr/i/rcv0

Following these well-designed models, I think we would be best served by 3 tabs:

What's New
Developers
Support

The What's New tab can display the flagship features from the current major/minor point release and the "about badgeos" blurb from the current help page. Looking at the examples, a link like "Go to BadgeOS Settings" page would be well advised, too.

The Developers tab can link to all of our different resources (API Docs, Hooks, Filters, Context-specific docs, etc). Possibly in a fashion that is laid out as prettily as the What's New tab.

The Support tab can present FAQs, Shortcode Usage, and links with explanations for Free Support, Premium Support and Bug Reports.

Other optional tabs: Credits and Translators

tw2113 commented 10 years ago

Even though this is targeted for 1.5, I did get started with it a little bit earlier. If I recall right, I have an "About", "Developers", and "Credits" tab ready. I pretty much yanked the WooCommerce file(s) for it and am editing from there.

Won't be a first-concern but I'll probably slip in a little bit of time here and there on it. I should make sure things are working well with the shortcodes and get all that up-to-snuff first.