Not planned Remove either help or pages

[Marcus]

xenForo is pretty big so it makes sense to focus. The help section and pages are pretty redundant. I would say the help system is more advanced, it is more user friendly.

There are lots of other stuff where I believe there should be a suggestion to remove stuff. Lots of good programmers in the Resources can make up for that.

 

[Chris D]

They are two different things, presented entirely differently.

There's no plans to remove either one.

 

[ENF]

So you're suggesting to remove existing functionality that site operators rely on as of now? You just want to pull those functions and have us turn to a 3rd party?

Ummm.....

 

[Marcus]

Exactly that, for me its duplicate functionality that can be achieved when one of the two is advanced. But now there are two systems achieving the same. To mindstorm this I created this thread.

 

[Mendalla]

Exactly that, for me its duplicate functionality that can be achieved when one of the two is advanced. But now there are two systems achieving the same. To mindstorm this I created this thread.

So pages and help should use the same functionality is really what you are saying, not that either should go completely away?

 

[Marcus]

There is always an upgrade path to community data it’s not that you do an upgrade and suddenly all pages are gone. They will be where they were before but internally for example the pages do everything.

Help can be “pages on a node with node_name “help” with a more streamlined interface”.

 

[Mendalla]

There is always an upgrade path to community data it’s not that you do an upgrade and suddenly all pages are gone. They will be where they were before but internally for example the pages do everything.

Help can be “pages on a node with node_name “help” with a more streamlined interface”.

Okay, that make more sense now. Your original post made it sound like you wanted to jettison both and have that sort of thing be handled by resources. Making help based on page nodes rather than its own subsystem is what you are really suggesting.

 

[Chris D]

FWIW, that's how I already understood it and we still have no intention to make changes here.

The systems are very different with different use cases. Some may use one, others may use the other, some may use a combination of the two to achieve what they want.

Add-on developers (and us!) can ship help pages as they can be associated with add-ons. That's not something we're looking to make available as a feature for page nodes.

Just use the functionality that makes the most sense for your use case.

 

[Marcus]

I wanted to help the dev team so my suggestion was to actually reduce their workload. Not like “can you please add this and maintain it over the years”.

Help is like pages on a node with node_name “help” and “not show in forum list”. Addons can add custom nodes in install routine like node_name “xenforo-search” and excludes it from forum list with node parent “help”.

 

[Chris D]

Aside from the reasons already stated, removing features doesn't help reduce our workload - it increases it.

We'd have to write code to transfer one thing to another, provide fallbacks or other graceful degradation to transition from one thing to another, update documentation, provide support for new ways of doing things and perhaps the worst is essentially throwing away dev hours we've already spent on a system to get it where it is today.

It's well intentioned but there's many more reasons to not do this than to do it.

 

[Marcus]

Yes yes, its well intentioned. Like this suggestion here: https://xenforo.com/community/threads/add-on-option-to-define-a-url-for-legal-notice.210963/ most suggestions ask for additional functionality where I think it can be achieved with existing feautures so I thought I want to do something to make your life easier in the long run not harder I do get that I don't know whether it is even more complicated to have multiple systems merge into one where its more straightforward to use them separate.

xenForo is the best there is to discuss content, no doubts about that. Thanks for the fast replying, its outstanding.