mojoPortal Tips: Adding a Custom Help Section

Written by Carole Bennett Saturday, 11 February 2012

If you are doing custom development within mojoPortal, your users will find it extremely beneficial (and you’ll have a much more peaceful deployment) if you leverage mojoPortal’s built-in help system.

There are two ways to include “help” references in a custom module or page: the first way, which is specific to module settings, is to add a “helpKey” attribute to a “FeatureSetting” element within the feature’s Feature Definition config file. To see an example, open up one of the config files under mojoPortal.Web/Setup/applications/KDMediaPlayer/FeatureDefinitions. You’ll notice the “helpKey” attributes reference a file name – these files are located under the /Data/HelpFiles section.

The second method of including a “help” reference in the custom page or feature is to leverage the portal:mojoHelpLink tag. An example you’ll find in the EditTrack.aspx file is as follows:

<portal:mojoHelpLink ID="TrackNameHelpLink" runat="server" HelpKey="MediaPlayerTrackName-help" />

By default, you’ll notice that the “Help” window that pops up leverages the same background as your main site; in the instance of strong patterns or low-contrast colors, this can make the “help” section less than helpful.

Here’s an addition to your CSS that will ensure that your help sections are clearly visible to your users:

body.help-page
{
	color:black;
	background-color: white;
	background-image: none;

}

This is included in the latest versions of mojoPortal skins, but may need to be retrofitted into older skins that have been updated to a current version of mojoPortal.

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