join forces or document differences from help tip [#287144]

Hello,

Thanks for your contribution of a new module!

Thanks for creating cool-aid which seems like a very handy module. Perhaps you are unaware of the Help Tip module http://drupal.org/project/helptip which is very similar in purpose and function.

It can be confusing to Drupal users to see multiple modules that do very similar things. To try to reduce that confusion one of the community values is to join forces where possible. Do you think that you could see about working with the helptip module maintainer to move your code into the 6.x branch of their project and remove the Cool Aid project? You'd also need to provide an upgrade mechanism to pull the data out of helptip and into coolaid (but that's probably a good idea anyway).

If you don't feel it's appropriate to merge the projects or the maintainers of the modules can't come to an agreeable way to do it, the next best thing to do is to document what makes Cool Aid different than Help Tip. This way users who might be confused by which one is better will understand when to choose one over the other. The obvious distinction that CoolAid works for 6.x isn't a good distinction to include in the list since it's generally trivial to update a module from one version to the next and therefore that distinction could become invalid quickly...

Comments

Comment #1

danielb CreditAttribution: danielb commented 27 July 2008 at 02:56

Thank you for bringing this to my attention, I was unaware of such a module. Having a look at it though it seems the methods used to create help messages are very different and may be difficult to merge the projects together to satisfy everyone's needs.

The process used by Help Tip appears to be:
- You create a node of a content type 'help'
- You choose which page the node will be displayed on
- 'help' nodes will then be displayed in a block that you previously positioned

For Cool Aid the idea is:
- You visit the page where the help is to appear
- You add a new message from an admin link on that page
- Messages are output via the theme's $help var along with messages from modules that implement hook_help()

The help objects are very light compared to nodes, they're just a string with a weight and some associated roles. This is much more efficient for our purposes (Job Search Website) - and I don't want to convert Cool Aid to nodes in a block (as admins we can acheive custom per-page content in blocks in a similar fashion to Help Tip already either using blocks, or a combination of cck/views/blocks which admittedly is harder to set-up for most people), and highly doubt Help Tip wants to lose the benefits of using nodes and blocks for D6. Using both paradigms in one module would be even more confusing - especially since Cool Aid is built for novice users (so basically your noob receptionist can go through and change messages without digging around in admin/content).

I am still developing the module, and the hook_help() method was just the first step, and I would like to have a feature in there such as a help tip for an existing block - which would be impossible if help messages had to be in a block of their own.

So unless I get a lot of enthusiasm from the Help Tip people wanting to use this module as the basis for a D6 version (which like I said, may not even be possible, but I haven't given it THAT much thought), I would rather just point out the differences of this module on the project page.