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It occurred to me that perhaps this forum should have a “how-to” category. Then members could use it to contribute descriptions of new features they developed for their site, problems they solved, etc. These contributions might be very useful to less experienced Symphony users and developers. If we had such a category, and when a member is viewing threads only under that category, the threads should perhaps be ordered on most-visited rather than most-recently-visited.

Better than a place on the forum would be a spot in the Learn section. A user-generated how-to guide for stuff. These could always relate to discussions on the forum. Something similar to what’s currently done with extensions.

Basically, a Symphony Wiki.

I considered that but the reason I leaned toward the forum was to give the more experienced users and developers a chance to review it and then let the core team decide if it is worth adding to the Learn section. But a Wiki could serve that purpose.

I suggested a Wiki of some kind at the Londom Symposium. I don’t remember it going down too well ;)

I will second it though, even if it isn’t built using Symphony, it would be so much easier than having to search through the forum all the time

definitely +1 from me…

PS, Wikis can be administerable which could filter out any problem texts or wrong categorization of articles.

I’m all for it!

Sounds similar to the call for help with documentation. This is probably one for the documentation working group: how should Symphony accept user generated documentation/tutorials?

That depends on how much control Symphony wants over the documentation. Are we looking at the Apple model or the Android model?

The difference is probably going to end up being amount and over-all quality of the tutorials. If anyone can submit anything with little to no review then we could end up with loads of tutorials, some a little redundant. If the Doc Working Group reviews every tutorial in full the quality of the tutorials would be rather high but there might not be a great breadth of topics.

Then you always get into the question of whether or not to do video tutorials, or at least video tutorials with text follow-along. After all, some things can be shown much more easily through a video, such as an interface walkthrough. When it gets into actual coding techniques, videos aren’t going to be as handy.

However, it would be great to see things like XSLT grouping best practices and techniques for tricky situations, that sort of thing.

One of the great benefits of having loads of these sorts of articles about XSLT is that you could, in theory, make the site a great resource for any XSLT and XPATH developer, whether or not they’re using Symphony. That, in turn, could help bring more people to the CMS.

They key issue here comes from the flexible design of Symphony. Ideally the official documentation would address the system itself. Since there are many ways to use the system, it means that there are many goals to write on, many ways to accomplish similar goals. This could get very messy very quickly (I think this is the hesitation about a wiki).

By that same token, it also means it is very important and valuable for community-generated content (such as tutorials) be made as available and meaningful as possible. One of the tasks of the docs wg is to determine where the line is most practically drawn between ‘official’ docs that have some authority and priority for maintenance, and other useful resources.

That said, there are many tasks for the docs group right now…

I’m not keen on video tutorials myself, I’m usually in a shared working environment and can’t access them. Text is always the way to go…

As a newcomer to Symphony I would definitely applaud a How-To (‘Cookbook’) section.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Forum offers a great wealth of information. The challenge, however, is to find it ;)

This goes for “How do I do…” stuff, but also for current/popular Extensions/Utilities. (I’ve proposed a small update to the ‘Featured Extensions’ section and/or maybe adding user-rating to Extensions.)

I’m not sure a Wiki is the best solution, or if these articles should live in the official Docs. I do believe however that the current fragmentation of information is an issue.

The “Help with Documentation” thread in itself fixes a bit of this. Something as simple as having a central page with links to (off-site) tutorials, threads, screencasts, etc. would already be of great help.

All, thanks for your input on this. We (the docs WG) are currently bouncing around ideas about how to get the community and the docs better aligned.

We have the benefit of an extremely smart and helpful group of people in the forums, and that makes our job quite a bit easier — it’s just a matter of harnessing the right set of tools and workflows to make sure everything works smoothly, so the people who want to contribute can do so easily.

If anyone has examples of other documentation systems that work well, please feel free to share. We’ve discussed several options (wikis, modifications to the forums functionality, etc.) but it’s early on and we’re still wide open to ideas.

I’m with designermonkey on video tutorials. I find most of them next to useless. A monotone narrative of a cursor flashing too quickly across a screen in most cases.

I had people like davidhund in mind when I suggested this. For a newcomer not even the easy stuff is obvious.

I’m not suggesting an alternative to a deeply reviewed and well organized formal documentation. I’m suggesting a way for a forum member to immediately put something they’ve learned or built on the forum for the potential use of other members. I know this can be done now but it tends to quickly get lost among all the other stuff in the General category. And the search function doesn’t work very well. Or I don’t know how to use it. Tutorial anyone? (I just searched on “How to” and it returned “No results found,” although there is a thread title that begins with those words on the first page.)

An alternative to putting it under Forum with a How To category is to put it under Discuss with a How To button. That way its threads won’t clutter up the General category.

An alternative to ordering on most-visited is to add a “Did you find this useful?” checkbox to each thread and ordering on the number of checks.

Of course, the documentation working group would be free to mine this resource as they see fit.

I really liked Carson (wisolman)’s original suggestion. Adding “How to” as a category in the forum is good, and making it a sub-section of Discuss is even better.

For a newcomer not even the easy stuff is obvious.

There have been times when I’ve struggled to figure out how to use an extension or XSLT utility, when even a very simple example would have given me a starting point and saved me time.

And the search function doesn’t work very well. Or I don’t know how to use it.

I often end up using http://www.google.com/search?q=site:getsymphony.com/discuss/+”How+to”

That’s a good point briandrum. Until we get a separate forum, anyone who wants to contribute a how-to could place [HowTo] at the beginning of their title to allow a more specific Google site search. Anyone wanting to do a wider search could, of course, use the more general “how to.”

My problem with that solution is that many threads do not start out as a “how to,” but may eventually end up with lots of “how to” material buried in subsequent comments. Surely, this solution would help, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle.

We need to establish a solid workflow for escalating forum topics into something like a how-to, which may be further promoted into the official docs, etc…

We need to establish a solid workflow for escalating forum topics into something like a how-to, which may be further promoted into the official docs, etc…

Nothing has been suggested in this thread that would prevent that from happening. What we’re talking about is providing a resource for that function while making the material immediately available for members to use or not use as they see fit.

“We need to establish a solid workflow…” equals time delay.

I’m not suggesting that this replace anything that exists today. I’m suggesting an additional resource for members to mine for help.

For a quick fix then, while more discussion is done on the best methods for users to quickly add easily findable hints, and for long term taxonomy and displaying of docs, I had an idea…

Would adding predefined tags to the forum be a simple solution?

Also, there are a lot of threads that ask similar questions that get answered elsewhere, would more control over closing these threads and linking them to ones with more info be helpful?

All just for the short term…

There are some good opinions and ideas happening here!

I’m not suggesting that this replace anything that exists today. I’m suggesting an additional resource for members to mine for help.

I agree that some mechanic for flagging such content would be useful. The concern is that there is already a considerable amount of work to be done to pull out just this kind of content out of the forum, and get it somewhere else that is more accessible and better-suited for that kind of content.

Don’t get me wrong, for right now I don’t think there would be any problem in doing exactly what you’ve described: composing & posting tutorials. I would suggest possibly just linking to a tutorial on your own site, since it may be easier to maintain & format, etc. That’s pretty much the idea behind this thread anyway.

“We need to establish a solid workflow…” equals time delay.

Yes, yes it does.

Would adding predefined tags to the forum be a simple solution?

We already have categories but tags could allow additional filtering of content.

That was my thinking exactly… We all use the tag list field right?

Tags can be non-category specific, which won’t limit your results to just one category, also a visitor could select a group of tags they are interested in and search for that list.

I reckon tagging of articles, and maybe tagging of responses? A search box would need to be built to accommodate this all, but it should be a good solution…

I’m scoping something similar for a non-Symphony project at work…

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