[6.0] New approach to Help pages

[ceford]

Problem identified

It looks unlikely that anyone will create Joomla 6 specific Help pages in docs.joomla.org. In fact doing so would be a bad idea as it would require us to maintain a system that many of us have come to dislike. So I propose:

Proposed solution

• Make the $helpurl parameter stored in configuration.php user configurable.
• Set the default value to https://help.joomla.org/proxy?keyref=Help50:{keyref}&lang={langcode}
• Revise the method of building the index of Help pages to use the language string keys rather than fetching them from docs.joomla.org

The immediate result of this suggestion is that we will be using Joomla 5 help pages in Joomla 6. I believe that there will be few significant changes so I doubt this will be a big problem.

The ultimate result will be that we can easily switch to a different help proxy server when a suitable one emerges.

Open questions

I might be able to create a PR myself but if anyone else would like to tackle it whilst in the Alpha phase I would gladly demur.

[brianteeman]

As stated elsewhere you dont need to change anything in the CMS at this time - you just need to change the redirects etc on the help server.

i would probably look at using joomla for the help server and the existing joomla api to build the helptoc and serve the pages but you are not at that stage yet and nothing needs to change in the CMS.

[brianteeman]

I guess this can be closed now as we have a new PR for the help pages

[ceford]

Agreed. PR #46355 is ready for testing.