Jeff, this sounds pretty cool - it will be very interesting to see how it works in practice. I look forward to checking it out.

So, I assume this is a supplement to the standard "F1" help documentation?

Are wikihelp user contributions going to carry over from one release to the next, or is it just going to start over with each new release?

This is where F1 will take you by default. An "offline" help file is used when an internet connection is not detected. The offline version of help that ships with Revit can be set as the default through an INI switch if that is preferred.


This is not quite such a cut and dried answer. With the current implementation of the Wiki we do not have a mechanisim to automatically pull contributions into our CMS (Content Management System). For now our moderators will review contributiuons and nominate them to be "harvested" and integrated into the next release. Of course anythign not carried over will still live on in the release specific portion of the Wiki where it was added.


P.S.

I just was trying out the search function in the Wiki and it is pretty cool. You can filter the search results to show results from the Users Guide, Videos, Autodesk Discussion Forums, Blogs, and other community sites. I think the search engine is still in the process of indexing content for search results so that will get better with time I think.

Thanks Jeff,

Although I am sure they are well aware of it, the speed of WikiHelp is VASTLY improved from the beta testing. Now pretty slick and as expected.

Speed is much better than in Beta. There were some limitations we were constrained with while working with this in beta. We also have a new search engine that looks to many resources beyond just the users guide.

I am glad your first reaction is "pretty slick"!

Browser Options for WikiHelp

For those who may be interested in using a browser other than Internet Explorer, (for me, it is Chrome all day everyday ), you can modify the Revit.ini file so that the default browser is selected rather than Internet Explorer.

To use your system default browser, set HelpBrowser=0.

To use Microsoft Internet Explorer, set HelpBrowser=1.

Cheers

Jeff, for your information, Ian and myself were doing some tests in the Wiki. Ian looked for the word "formula" using the "Discussion forums" resource. He got 1 result, that lead to an irrelevant thread in the Autodesk forums. I looked for the word "formulas" (which contains "formula" in singular, of course) and got 0 results when looking in the same "Discussion forums" resource.

Another question I have about the Wiki documents is how much help content is new for 2012, and how much has been left identical, as happened to The Families Guide from 2010 to 2011, which was left unchanged.

The search engine has only been indexing Revit content since last Friday so it is possible it will get better with time. The actual help files should be fully indexed but the other resources are still a bit under construction. You can provide feedback directly to the wiki tem through the "Feedback" link at the top right of the wiki pages. They know way more about the search mechanisims than I do.


The new and changed major functions of Revit should all be covered in the users guide. Minor changes to things may not necessarily get specifically documented.

For example I know there was a change in the material properties dialog where custom parameters are displayed. In older versions this box was only one line, so if a material had more than one custom parameter it was hard to make changes because you had to scroll because you could only see one at a time. Now that section of the materials dialog is much bigger so multiple custom parameter can be seen at one time. This change is probably (I took a quick look and did not see it) not documented anywhere.

Because all of the help was ported over to the Wiki some minor changes to formatting etc... has happened to many sections of the help. Notice in the wiki all 3 flavors of Revit are contained in one "users guide" this made us touch basically every section of all 3 users guides so some changes are going to happen as these things get combined. The basic information is the same.

The Families Guide is a totally different situation. That is considered a seperate deliverable and was simply not even touched from 2010 to 2011 (or 2012 for that matter.)

Firefox here so thanks for that :thumbsup:

I uninstall IE whenever possible.