Put links to manual.mahara.org into Mahara itself

[Aaron Wells]

In Bug 1393465, Tobias suggested the idea of putting links to manual.mahara.org into Mahara itself, kind of like how Moodle contains links to the Moodle online documentation.

I think this is a great idea. Our manual is even better suited to direct linking than the Moodle one, because it's static instead of being a wiki, and we have separate versions of it up for different Mahara versions and languages. Plus people are often unaware of the manual and surprised when they discover it, and how complete it is.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

A few things to keep in mind:

1. The manual page URL contains the series and language code: http://manual.mahara.org/en/1.10/ . So that should make it easier to automatically generate the correct URLs for people. You can get the series from $CFG->series, and the language from current_language(). We could have a function that auto-detects these to generate the right absolute URL.

2. That aside, the page URLs may change from one release to another. So we'd need to automatically check these with each release. On the other hand, if we use a function to auto-detect them, then that should make it easy to find all the places where that function is called and look at the relative URL passed to it.

3. The manual is not available in all languages. Currently it's only translated into English, German, French, and Dutch. Sites that are using other languages might not want links to a foreign-language manual all over the place. Also, some sites might want to disable the help links because it's a link to an external site. So there should probably be a config-defaults.php setting to disable the help links sitewide.

[Kristina Hoeppner (kris-hoeppner)]

This was implemented in Mahara 18.04.