Tip: adding customised help to your edit forms

Yesterday we looked at how you can add help to individual fields of your edit forms with the help attribute. Perch gives you another way to help your users to complete forms in the administration section with the perch:help tag.

To use the perch:help tags – add them to your template as shown here:

<perch:help>
    <p>Any amount of HTML-formatted help can be specified here, 
        including images and links if required.</p>
</perch:help>

You can add any HTML elements here so you can format even long sections of information nicely. You can also add links to further information – for instance you might have created an HTML guide for your editors and want to link through to an example in that. Or the form might ask them to provide an image, which they would generally source from the Flickr Creative Commons Search – providing a link to that and information about how to credit the photographer could be put here.

In addition you could add an image, or even a short instructional video for your content editors.

Adding a help section to an edit form is a great way to encourage good content as well as making the process altogether more human. See the documentation of more.