When building CCK forms you can add plenty of helpful description text per fields to help out new users. However all the text can clutter forms when regular users are just filling out nodes regularly.

I'm proposing a small question mark button icon in the top right corner of all forms in the admin area. Clicking the button toggles the display of the description text below form fields.

Some jquery i wrote to hide all descriptions, add a clickable question mark link, and then allow toggling the display is below.
$('form .description').hide(); $('#content form').prepend('<a id="descriptionhelp">?</a>').click(function() { $('form .description').toggle() });

Comments

sign’s picture

sign CreditAttribution: sign commented

good idea, just to add to it,
in settings it will be possible to hide these descriptions per role

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
CreditAttribution: budda commented

Perhaps adding some help text at the top of all forms, explaining they should click the question mark for guidance/help would remove the problem of people not realising their is help available from the question mark icon.

The feature could be disabled/enabled via the Theme Specific Settings too. So if your site is aimed at idiots, don't activate the feature?

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
CreditAttribution: budda commented

Another option is to reveal the description when the form element is in focus. Some example code, although not perfect follows:

$('form .description').hide();
$(':input').focus(function () { $(this).next().show("slow") });
$(':input').blur(function () { $(this).next().hide("slow") });

This doesn't work on checkboxes etc.

sign’s picture

sign CreditAttribution: sign commented

Did some work on this, not committed yet
http://www.flickr.com/photos/30032901@N04/3643946265/

need a lightweight tooltip, the vtip I am using here is not the best one (cant put html in), any suggestions?

budda’s picture

budda
Primary language English
Location Cheshire
CreditAttribution: budda commented

Re: tooltips - this was on the front page of Digg.com today - http://www.webdesignbooth.com/15-jquery-plugins-to-create-an-user-friend...

sign’s picture

sign CreditAttribution: sign commented

Tested few tooltips.
The JQuery tools tooltip looked best, but it has one major issue. When you try to hover over the tooltip it dissapears.
So my favourite one now is simpletip, which works nice and trying to style it so it looks pretty... :)

sign’s picture

sign CreditAttribution: sign commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

won't implement, there are some modules already that are doing that kind of functionality
feel free to re-open if you have any neat solution :)

eg. http://drupal.org/project/beautytips and http://drupal.org/project/formtips

AjitS’s picture

AjitS
he/him
Primary language Marathi
Location Pune
CreditAttribution: AjitS commented
Issue summary: View changes

#3 above solved my purpose, but it hides the clientside_validation issues. I used the following to resolve it:

$('form .description').hide();
$(':input').focus(function () { $(this).siblings('.description').show() });
$(':input').blur(function () { $(this).siblings('.description').hide() });