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  1. Moodle
  2. MDL-78462

Improve Moodle Documentation and Support

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    • Icon: Improvement Improvement
    • Resolution: Unresolved
    • Icon: Minor Minor
    • None
    • 4.2.1
    • General, Usability
    • None
    • MOODLE_402_STABLE

      Looking into this at MoodleMoot DACH 2023. Initial investigation identified that:

      1) site admin settings for this are split in unhelpful ways

      • Moodle Docs is at your.moodle.site/admin/settings.php?section=documentation
      • Support is at your.moodle.site/admin/settings.php?section=supportcontact

      -> These should be merged into a single Documentation and Support section

       

      2) Moodle Docs forking does not make any sense

      There is an option to completely repoint the Moodle Docs to an institutional fork of the Moodle Docs. "docroot". While it's technically feasible as a logged in user to Export pages from the official Moodle Docs and create your own fork on your own instance of Mediawiki, this is really not practicable, it's only possible to export specific categories. (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Export#Using_'Special:Export' & https://docs.moodle.org/402/en/Special:Export ). There is no easy way to seed and fork Moodle Docs. And it doesn't make sense. Not even the largest Moodle instances would want to invest the time in recreating the entire collaborative effort of the Moodle Docs.

      -> remove this option entirely

       

      3) The  configuration options do not support the kind of support provided by institutions

      There is an option to provide a Support Email but this is hidden in favour of a support link if provided but the language associated does not change - clicking "contact site support" and it redirecting to a website with the institutions' support pages does not make sense. 

       

      What a typical institution would want to provide is:

      • Contextual Moodle Docs link (as of now)
      • A link to their own documentation landing page where guides have screenshots of their own site 
      • Link to log a ticket for help or send an email - this is in theory provided now but because the previous option doesn't exist it ends up being used instead & then the language for it makes even less sense

      -> Add a new setting for the Institutional documentation so that the "supportpage" setting doesn't get misused as currently.

       

      4) Override the Contextual Moodle Docs link to point to a specific institutional documentation page

      e.g. we may want to replace the Moodle Docs guidance on the Moodle Assignment to include the wider documentation about the assessment practices of the institution or where there is an error link with no documentation in Moodle Docs we may want to catch this and display an institution specific error page

      In order to facilitate this, we should have a Site Admin page where these overrides can be inputed. Ideally, we could display all of the Moodle Docs links upfront and allow that customisation. However, this may be challenging to implement and flipping this to replacing a specific Moodle Docs support link with an institutional link could be a more practical way to implement

      Would need to go into it's own MUC cache definition

       

      Would map something like "admin/setting/documentation" to a URL 

      -> big effort but worth it 

      -> would need to document how to make use of this as "admin/setting/documentation" may not be obvious thing to find for site admins

       

      5) Leading from 4), we also consider that some plugins will not use the Moodle Docs and may want to provide links to their own documentation e.g. STACK has built in docs for that Moodle or could link to the / github repo version but would benefit from being able to provide those overrides in bulk

       

       

            Unassigned Unassigned
            aspark Alistair Spark
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            3 Vote for this issue
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              Created:
              Updated:

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