unified help system

[evan wheeler]

Hi all,

I've been interested in coming up with an easy way to provide a unified, global help menu system for rapidsms deployments. Some projects and apps provide some sort of help messaging, but there's always a possibility of help keyword collisions and inconsistencies from these separate implementations. rapidsms-appointments [1] provides a novel way of organizing handlers that really lends itself to a comprehensive, discoverable help menu system.

I hacked together an example of how something like this might work [2] 

Its definitely not thoroughly thought-through (i18n??) and doesn't offer any help hooks for any functionality in app.py files (just handlers)

I'd love to hear thoughts about ways to improve this or ideas for different approaches.

Cheers

Evan

1. https://github.com/caktus/rapidsms-appointments/tree/master/appointments/handlers

2. https://github.com/rapidsms/rapidsms/pull/315

[Dan Poirier]

I like the idea of helping different apps to co-exist.

I think we might go further than a unified help system and consider a unified dispatch system.  It could be its own app, like the current handlers app, so using it is optional. 

It might be modeled on Django's URL confs- allow the project to map top-level patterns to apps, then include each app's own set of patterns into the overall set of rules.

Am I getting carried away here?  :-)

Dan P.