Description

This plugin is designed as a mini-cms for help, so nondevelopers can maintain help throughout the site. It injects help tips into pages by defining help tips domain obects. Designed to be completely unobtrusive (dynamically adds the code through ajax, and only where help exists).

I needed to insert help throughout my site, but wanted to give non-technical team members ability to define where the help tips go, and their text.

Getting Started

The easiest way to get started is to check out the sample application, which shows

There is a functional sample application at (test/projects/sample. Switch to that directory and run grails run-app): http://svn.codehaus.org/grails-plugins/grails-dynamic-help/tags/LATEST_RELEASE/

To Use:

Add to HEAD section:

<g:helpTips controller="book">

The easiest way is to add it to the layout as:

<g:helpTips controller="$controllerName" />

The plugin will add some jQuery code that will attach itself to input fields with ids specified in HelpTips obects.

Options -

Turn off JQuery

<g:helpTips controller="$controllerName" includeJQuery="${false}"/>

Turn off JQuery-UI, i.e. if you use jQuery-ui-lib plugin.

<g:helpTips controller="$controllerName" includeJQueryUI="${false}"/>

If there are no help tips for the specific controller, nothing will be rendered, so keep that in mind if you are using jQuery / jQuery UI outside of this plugin.

Editing Help Tips

The controller for editing tips is at /helpTips.

There are four parameters for each tip.

• Controller - the name of the controller where the tip will appear
• Tip Selector - the name of the id element that the tip will be attached to.
• Tip Name - title of the tip.
• Tip Description - the text of the tip. This can be in HTML.

Rich Editors

• Grails UI
• Rich UI
• CKEditor
• FCKeditor (not tested, but there is a handler for it).

License: Apache

Release Notes:

• May 2, 2010 - 0.2 - Initial Release
• Note: The JavaScript part was adopted from the excellent Nimble plugin.
• May 5, 2010 - 0.3
• Many Changes -
• Help Tip Domain Object Changes
• added "published" property that controls when something should be shown
• tip description database column can be larger than default.
• Now instead of using Ids, you can use JQuery Selectors, so use #myId where you used to use just myId.
• Bootstrapping some tips for HelpTip edit pages.
• Custom theme included with sample app for JQuery UI 1.8
• Can now turn off inclusion of JQuery UI (I.e. if using JQuery-ui-lib plugin)
• Fixed JavaScript Issue with the way BT html was generated
• Sample App Updated, it now includes ckeditor, jquery and jquery ui plugin dependencies.