User Assistance Plan for Eclipse 3.6

By Chris Goldthorpe, IBM. Last revised 09/21/2009

Background

All of the feature requests for Eclipse 3.6 can be found in Bugzilla. Below is a summary of the planned new features together with a link to the corresponding Bugzilla entry which contains more information.

Milestone 1 08/07/2009

[Webapp] Help system webapp: Provide footer area like banner area (persistent, across browser window, optional)
Allow a footer to be added to the help webapp by setting a customization property. This has been requested to allow copyright information to be displayed at the bottom of the help frames.

[Help] Add alphabetical ordering attribute to TOC DTD
This allows anchor nodes in the table of contents to have their children sorted alphabetically.

Milestone 2 09/18/2009

Add child links to topics with content at runtime.
Allows elements in the table of content which are anchors to contain hyperlinks to each of their children.

Milestone 3 10/30/2009

These enhancements will allow additional UI elements to be added to the help webapp.

[Webapp] Allow additional views to be added to the help webapp
[Webapp] Allow additional frame(s) below content frame
[Webapp] Allow additional buttons to be added to the help webapp.

The next three enhancements will make it easier to create UA content.
[Intro] Make the RSS news reader reusable
Mechanism for publishing internal resources of cheatsheet plugin
Additional help / debugging for CSH issues

Help system - Remote UA - Network error handling

Milestone 4 12/11/2009

[Help] Cannot change font size in help view (Windows or Macintosh)

Remote UA: What to do when local and remote plug-ins are both present

Milestone 5 01/29/2010

[Help][Index] See references added to the keyword index
The keyword index in Eclipse is missing a standard feature of an index, the ability to display synonyms as links to another keyword.

Milestone 6 (API Freeze) 03/12/2010