Changes to online help

For those who don't know, right now, loading the page /doc/help reads the file /doc-src/help, runs it through Markdown processing (plus a bit of homebrew variable substitution), and shows it on the page.

I'd like to make the following online help changes.

1. I18n. We can have multiple versions of a help file in different languages. The naming convention is to add the language code at the end (help.en, help.fr, help.es). We do language content negotiation for each document, separate from the UI content negotiation. Thus, if I have my browser configured for Chinese first and French second, and my main UI is in Chinese, when I load /doc/help and there are only versions in en, fr, and es, it will load the fr version.
2. Local versions. Administrators can make local versions of help files and put them in local/doc-src/. There can be multiple language versions in local/doc-src/ and the same content-negotiation rules apply. However, the documents won't fall back to the defaults. In the example above, if there is a local/doc-src/help.en and a local/doc-src/help.es, then the user with Chinese and French configured in the browser will see the content of local/doc-src/help.en as the default fallback -- not the content of doc-src/help.fr.

Finally, I'd love to figure out a good way to develop these documents on status.net/wiki/ and take snapshots to include in release versions. Brion, would this be a good use of Flagged Revisions in MW?

Originally posted to mailing list