The Advanced Help module provides a framework that allows help texts to be viewed as integrated into a Drupal website.

These help texts are stored in ordinary .html-files that lives in the file system (as opposed to the database). These files are distributed from the project Drupal.org repo in the same package as the module or theme, and placed in a subdirectory named help in the project or theme directory.

The help texts can be placed in an hierarchical book, allowing for top-down navigation, or programmatically placed in popups that can be added to a page with plain text links or themed icon links.

If there is a README.md or README.txt in the package, the content of that file may be shown as well.

Cross-linking book-sections,using fragment identifiers, works as one would expect.

The help texts may be made searchable, but are not so by default (see “Using advanced help” for details). If search is enabled, all help texts are fully indexed. This means that the entire contents of the advanced help set of pages can be searched for keywords.

Modules and themes can even insert help texts into another project's hierarchy.

May be integrated into hook_help() using companion module Advanced Help Hint.

Demonstration

The project comes with a small demo module named Advanced Help Example to demonstrate how it works. This example also shows how to make use of some of the css classes provided.

For an example of a project that makes extensive use of the advanced help features, see the Views project.

For an example of translation of help text, see the directory translations/help/nb in the Advanced Help Example submodule. For translation instructions, see the section named “Translating advanced help”.

Theme

The Advanced Help and Advanced Help Example modules implements hook_admin_paths_alter() to render the help texts rendered using the site's administrative theme. The help.css provided is created with the theme Seven in mind. Using a different administrative theme may require you to create custom css for the site.

The contributed module Administrative pages seems to override hook_admin_paths_alter(). If you use this module, you also need to navigate to Configuration » User interface » Administrative pages and declare these paths as administrative pages:

help/advanced_help/*
help/help_example/*

You may attach your own custom css to any project that uses Advanced Help to provide help.