I'm very pleased to announce that we (hopefully) have a new help system in Core that will actually serve the needs of module, theme, and distribution developers! It is called "Help Topics", and is currently in "Experimental Module" status in Drupal core 8.8.x.

The way it works:

  • Modules, themes, and distributions can have a help_topics subdirectory in their projects, where they can write help topics in the form of Twig template files. Each project can have as many topics as they want/need to document their project.
  • The Twig files have meta-data (in HTML meta tags) at the top to define the title of the topic, whether the topic is "top-level" or not, and a list of other topics to mark as "related".
  • When a user visits the admin/help page (assuming the Help and Help Topics modules are enabled), they will see a list of the top-level topics, and can click through to read them. When reading a topic, at the end they'll see a list of all the topics that are "related" (and "related" is automatically a bi-directional relationship).

So... The module is currently in "Experimental" status, and we need your help to get it to "Beta" and then "Stable" status in Drupal Core:

This effort is being led by andypost, Amber Himes Matz, and jhodgdon... if you have questions, we can all often be found on Slack or on drupal.org.