In-App Documentation

[Gerry]

As the Hornbill documentation platform continues to evolve, the latest changes bring the Hornbill Docs content, directly into our applications. There are many places in the Hornbill platform and applications where it would be ideal to provide addtional, contextual help/guidance./reference. What started as an ad-hoc exercise to add the odd popup help option in our software for particularly complicated inputs or settings, has evolved now into a unified method of adding in-app help to any part of Hornbill we need to, with a unified and well document approach to content creation, the Hornbill Docs platform has now been extended to allow "embedded" content to be created. This type of content allows for the creation of pages in a HDocBook that do not form part of the browsable/searchable content, but instead is designed to be embedded inside our applications.

Unlike before, where the content was embedded in the source code, this content is now being served from our Hornbill Docs system which means...
 

• The content can be edited/updated/improved without having to do a software release.
• The content can be contributed to via GitHub via a well documented external contributor process through GitHub pull requests.
• In-App help popups provide immediate access to PDF versions of the popup content
• As our Hornbill Docs system evolves, features such as embedded video content, up/down voting/feedback/discussions added to the Hornbill Docs system will be brought into the application too.

See the video below, a picture says 1000 words...