The opening page of Help needs to be rewritten. The page should feature links to the release note, mozilla community link, and newsgroups (duplicate www.mozilla.org/start/1.4/support.html). Keller, you asked where to put info on talkback agent. Perhaps this is a good place too.

OK. The release notes thing is pretty reasonable since we could use the DTD file. Newsgroups wouldn't be bad either. I don't know if I'd like to have talkback content on this page, though. It would seem kinda strange to have it in the introductory content. We might just keep it in the glossary after all.

Maybe some stuff from the Mozilla 1.0 start page would be good to add.

I'm actually thinking about sub-catagories under Help and Support Center. We could use separate pages for Mozilla feedbacks (e.g. crash report, Minh's wishlist, and our de-facto support forums - MozillaZine forums). Also, I think this bug should apply to 1.4.2 (I doubt we can make it to 1.4.1) and btw, we have a new and better 1.4 start page already ;-)

Daniel, per your comment to Bart's email: MozillaPL Team (http://mozillapl.org) also offers technical support which is free but right now based on consultants availabity. We support our branded versions as well as original Mozilla.org bits. It's Polish language based service.

well, actually we can't do the DTD thing. It doesn't seem to work with HTML, so we're probably not going to get release notes in.

This is my incomplete patch. I posted it so y'all can see what I'm thinking about and get some feedback on it.

How about? [HELP ON THE WEB] [MOZILLA COMMUNITY] *Release Notes*: Latest *MozillaZine*: the oldest information about known community site around, problems or issues with providng news flashes, Mozilla. polls, and Web forums. *Troubleshooting*: asnwers to some of the most frequently encountered problems. *PluginDoc*: up-to-date information on Mozilla plug-ins. [SUPPORT] mozilla does not provide official support. However, you can use the following third-party resources to get your questions answered. [Technical Support] [Peer Support] *DecisionOne*: commercial *MozillaZine Forums*: service providing e-mail Web forums for Mozilla and phone-in support. users like you *MozillaPL*: free community *User Newsgroups*: user service based on consultants newsgroups hosted by availabity. mozilla.org *Realtime Chat*: chat with Mozilla users via IRC. [USER FEEDBACK] *Quality Talkback Agent*:

I don't think that the release notes will work without the DTD. I don't like the thought of having to update the release notes URL in help every milestone. Also, where does DecisionOne link to? Isn't technical support though DecisionOne official support from mozilla.org (or going to be)? They said something like that from MozillaZine. I don't think I like the Quality Feedback Agent there either. That's for crash data, it's not really for feedback on the product. Also, to think about localization, would something like this be easy to translate? We might end up having different content for different languages. I'm going to try and see how Netscape does it.

Is there a user newsgroup page?

> Is there a user newsgroup page? http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.4/support.html , but newsgroups are going to be moved to a newserver and reorganized (bug 62228)

> [Technical Support] [Peer Support] > *DecisionOne*: commercial *MozillaZine Forums*: > service providing e-mail Web forums for Mozilla > and phone-in support. users like you The beta site (http://www.mozilla.org/website-beta/support/) has a nice support page we could link to. > *Troubleshooting*: > asnwers to some of the > most frequently > encountered problems. Where would this link to?

> The beta site has a nice support page we could link to. yes, when it goes live. >> *Troubleshooting*: > > Where would this link to? www.mozilla.org/start/1.4/faq/troubleshooting.html . It's not clear that the FAQ contains troubleshooting info. I think we should move it to 1.4/troubleshooting/ because it's a large topic on its own.

Let's wait until the Mozilla 1.6 start page is up before fixing this.

*** Bug 225663 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

-> Bart :-)

Daniel, why'd you reassign this?

Patch with added stuff. It looks a bit plain now. bart: may you please supply us with some images that will make this page more visually appealing?

--> me

*** Bug 225663 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Hi folks, It's great to see that you guys are working on improving the Help welcome page. I do think that the Netscape one is a great reference. What's the easiest way to view the page with the patch applied? Re: art work. I don't have any. I just put together a quick (and dirty!) hack of an icon last night based on what was already on the site. Dawn, endico@mozilla.org, however, has postscript files for at least the M icon and just pushed that to the site - so you can contact her if you'd like the original. Let me know if there's any other way I can help. My biggest priority is that we have at least a text link to Decision One phone support by the time we release 1.6.

This patch updates all the links to jar.mn and in other docs to the new XHTML welcome screen, along with the updated layout from the previous patch.

> What's the easiest way to view the page with the patch applied? Here's some screenshots of the page. It's difficult to view the page without buliding it because of the CSS changes.

A big move forward for what we currently ship! My personal preference would be to consolidate the support info as much as possible around the /support/index.html page on the web site to improve manageability. I'm sure that page could be a lot better than it is now. I'm worried that maintaining a number of different help areas (the help menu, the start page, the web page) will prove hard to maintain over time. A specific suggestion in this regard: there are currently 3 subsections on /support/index.html. Let's add additional ones if necessary and let's then simply link to the appropriate subsection from the help menu page. So in the Support area, instead of Technical Support and Peer Support with the various subentries, we would feature: Telephone Support | End User Documentation | Community Support (or any additional subsections that you may wish to add to the support page on the web site) and an intro sentence for each. For telephone support, I suggest "Need help? Affordable telephone support is <link>now available</link>. And I suggest that we remove the Help on the Web and Mozilla Community sections altogether. If we want those sections, let's put them on the /support/index.html page as subsections and then link to that.

> My personal preference would be to consolidate the support info as much as > possible around the /support/index.html page on the web site to improve > manageability. I'm sure that page could be a lot better than it is now. I'm > worried that maintaining a number of different help areas (the help menu, the > start page, the web page) will prove hard to maintain over time. Aren't we doing that now, though? We do link to the support page. > A specific suggestion in this regard: there are currently 3 subsections on > /support/index.html. Let's add additional ones if necessary and let's then > simply link to the appropriate subsection from the help menu page. So are you thinking of a format like this: <h2>Support</h2> <p><strong>Community Support</strong></p> or this: <h2>Support</h2> <h3>Community Support</h3> ... info and links to community support. > So in the Support area, instead of Technical Support and Peer Support with the > various subentries, we would feature: Telephone Support | End User Documentation > | Community Support (or any additional subsections that you may wish to add to But we can only have two headings in a section. Are you asking for what I said above?

+ <p><strong><a href="http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/troubleshooting.html">Troubleshooting</a></strong></p> should link to start/1.4/troubleshooting quality feedback agent should link to http://www.mozilla.org/quality/qfa.html

> should link to start/1.4/troubleshooting Thanks for telling me! I was trying to figure out where to link that too and couldn't figure out a troubleshooting section in the 1.4 docs. > quality feedback agent should link to http://www.mozilla.org/quality/qfa.html OK, I'll put that in the next patch. I'll keep this patch up for another day or two to obtain feedback.

Patch with daniel's comments.

Comment on attachment 136198 [details] [diff] [review] Patch v2 Daniel, feel free to review- this if you see a problem.

This patch uses &brandShortName; instead of Mozilla in places where it'd be appropriate. Forgot it in the last patch, sorry for the spam!

Does recent nightlies have Quality Feedback Agent? If not we should comment it out for now. Keller, you might want to update chrome://global-region/locale/region.dtd too. Also, you have two links to www.mozilla.org and one to mozilla.org, make up your mind please ;-) (btw, I prefer www.)

> Keller, you might want to update chrome://global-region/locale/region.dtd too. why? What needs to be changed? everything looks OK to me. > Also, you have two links to www.mozilla.org and one to mozilla.org, make up your > mind please ;-) (btw, I prefer www.) heh. aren't we being a bit picky, now? the "www" is too many letters to type :). Personally I don't think it's worth spamming people by making a new patch and attaching it.

Comment on attachment 136200 [details] [diff] [review] Patch v2.1 >Index: resources/locale/en-US/help_help.html You should patch help_help.xhtml too. >+ <p><strong>Realtime Chat</strong></p> A link irc://moznet/mozillazine would be nice here.

--> Browser: Help It's not really the appropriate place, but we can set approval1.6b flags there :)

Comment on attachment 136200 [details] [diff] [review] Patch v2.1 > You should patch help_help.xhtml too. hmm. not sure how that got changed. when I check this in, I'll change it to .xhtml. >+ <p><strong>Realtime Chat</strong></p> A link irc://moznet/mozillazine would be nice here. I was thinking of this, but ChatZilla might not be installed on that users machine. Maybe having a link below mentioning getting help in IRC? Not sure if this would be appropriate place for that, either, since it looks like we're trying to contain information about mozilla support, and IRC doesn't appear to be an official place for support (at least I don't think so, could be wrong).

Comment on attachment 136200 [details] [diff] [review] Patch v2.1 a=asa (on behalf of drivers) for checkin to 1.6b.

Fix checked in. Any other issues/enhancements should go in another bug.

v many issues remain

> MozillaPL Team (http://mozillapl.org) also offers technical support which is > free but right now based on consultants availabity. > We support our branded versions as well as original Mozilla.org bits. It's > Polish language based service. P. Bartecki, can you give a specific page to this support thing? rlk, Help and m.o/support/ should link to www.mozilla-europe.org/en/services/ , which offers enterprise support. (I know, I should file a new bug, but feeling lazy...)

Daniel: please file a new bug, and while you are at it, explain what on earth you are talking about :-) Thanks, Gerv

> Daniel: please file a new bug, and while you are at it, explain what on earth > you are talking about :-) sorry, bug 250809