What should we do first?

[nils73]

Alright now ... wishy has passed the baton onto me and now I am right in the middle of scribbling down some notes so that we should not forget anything. I have set up this vote, where you all can vote what to do next. If anyone wants to come up with suggestions for the structure of the documentation he or she is welcome to say it out loud.

wishy has assigned the Administration role to me for which I feel very honoured. After we have settled on a concept I will be glad to create additional users who would like to contribute. There were quite a few and I hope that there will be even more once we have started our little project.

To quicken up things I have set this poll to last 5 days. Maybe we are faster than that, but now it's time for the votes ...

[Ted]

The one thing to keep in mind is that documentation shouldn't be a straight walkthrough of the admin.  Real docs should be task oriented.  What do I have to do to accomplish?  It should start small and build on previous material to expand the skill set.

I think of something like a decent camera manual.  It usually starts off with: How do I take a picture on full auto?  Ok, so i want to control one aspect (aperture) a little differently, what do I do?  How about manual focus?  etc.

Yes, I know this makes it harder to write.  But I really think it would be a good idea and gives us one more thing ahead of the pack in this crowded market of software.

Thoughts?

[jah]

I  support Patricias (and I see wishy is also writing along the same lines while I'm editing this reply) idea here. First of all we should create documentation for getting the first page up and running. I think the BASIC part here could be something like: "Creating your first site with CMS Made Simple".

Another issue about format. It is quite easy to create some flash tutorials for the simple things. Should we create that?

[Ted]

I think the flash thing is a great idea.

But...

I think we should concentrate on hard, portable documentation first.  It's what most people are going to go to in a pinch.

[Alex_Leipzig]

No flash for now, I think. And let's not forget an installation how-to!

[miketmc]

I think, that the following steps are important for "newbies" like me:

1. Install CMSms
2. create your own design/template (perhaps with an libary of different templates; for example see -->http://www.mamboos.de/option,com_galler ... .html  )
3. Manage your content

[nils73]

The thing about basic and advanced sounds good to me though it is always hard to tell when you are advanced and when you aren't. But I'd like to pick up that idea and combine it with wishys suggestions. We should focus on tasks and when I create manuals I always think of a cookbook --- what do you need (to buy), what tools do you need, where do you start, how do you decorate it and so on..

- Setting the stage
- Installation
- My first page
- My first image
- ...
- ...
- Writing a module

Maybe we should display a level of difficulty (from n00b to programmer) to accomplish the respective task. You can not cover each and everything so I would assume something like a HelpDesk / FAQ as crucial. There are quite a lot of questions already in the forum that are being asked twice or more. And I would like to avoid unfriendly RTFM answers because I do not like to read manuals but I read FAQs.

Regards,
Nils

[Ted]

That's actually a really good idea.  Giving a difficulty or skill level and ordering things that way.  It won't be perfect, but if geared towards the "average" user, it should be a decent solution.

A dynamic FAQ would also be a good idea.  Maybe take Piratos FAQ module and expand it with user submissions?

[nils73]

A dynamic FAQ would also be a good idea.  Maybe take Piratos FAQ module and expand it with user submissions?

Great idea. I wanted to use pFAQ if possible and if everybody else is d'accord with this solution. Seems that most votes go for "structure first" so we should begin to gather information. Hopefully I get the time to translate my German powerpoint presentation into English this weekend so I can convert it to HTML with OpenOffice and put the contents into CMSMS afterwards. We could do both processes simultanously: gathering content and assigning it to certain topics / groups.

Regards
Nils

[piratos]

??

I did not seen any words of a real document. Who writes something ??

[nils73]

Took me quite some time to go through the forum and look for instances, wherre people made suggestions for the documentation, installation and stuffl ike that. Then I looked at the short survey (structure is the winner) and then added my own thoughts and the transformed the structure of my own help file into this first suggestion for the documentation structure:



The discussion has moved here: http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.ph ... 150.0.html



Your input is welcome. I have tried to build blocks according to knowledge levels needed. Still I would really like to add a feature that enables people to search an sort the documentation according to the skills needed to perform a certain task. Or maybe just see how difficult it might be (from noob to php-oo-programmer and admin). This might serve as an add-on. Modules like pFAQ should be included. Links to the Wiki and the forum as well. The documentation should start in English and may be translated later on. If someone would write a PDF-output module, that would be nice. Otherwise a print CSS-stylesheet would do a great job as well for the beginning.

Now it is your turn to add your comments.

Regards,
Nils