modius wrote:
>
>
> Was the 130 page developer course book of any use to you?
> http://docs.farcrycms.org:8080/confluence/display/FCDEV40/Developer+Training+Course
>
It sure was. To be more precise, only when I first realised this was
available, I started to give farcry a fair go.
> Especially not a wiki that has lots of open/dead ends, and makes things
> more
> confusing then provide clearity. Most of the answers I was seeking,
> answers
> to common questions, where found in the mailinglist. And that says it all.
> I
> am apparently not the only one.
It would be great if more people contributed documentation. The
reason we have a WIKI is that it makes it easy anyone to contribute.
In fact if you have seen answers to questions not answered in the WIKI
on this list -- *anyone* on this list might add them to the WIKI.
In truth, writing technical documentation is difficult and by and
large unrewarding -- trust me, I wrote most of the hundreds of pages
of documentation that exist today and nobody ever says its enough.
Once people have the answer to a problem, they seldom make time to
contribute that knowledge back. We continue to improve the
documentation as we have time. And I suspect that in many areas the
depth of documentation may surprise you.
I know writing documentation is very unrewarding. I have been there myself
lots of times.
But having a lot of documentation and having people complain about the
documentation at the same time should ring a bell. Maybe the documentation
is not so easy to find? Maybe users have to resort to the documentation
where they really shouldn't ?
People need to point out what documentation they need most -- play
editor, indicate where things are not clear, and so on. That assists
the community as a whole to focus on the areas of documentation that
need the most attention.
> How about something simple as little help popups/ tooltips on the farcry
> cms
> pages?
> Why is there, after so many years of development, no help system?
Actually there is :)
The problem is most regular users do not want to be weighed down by
the addition of inline hints and tooltips. Especially when most
things in the UI itself are mainly self evident. The user
documentation that is generally needed is "what is news and how do i
publish it?" and not "What does the Publish Date mean?". So the level
of inline documentation tends to trend to minimal.
Now here I strongly disagree with you. Inline documentation is very
important. Very.
And what you or other developers may find self evident, may not be so self
evident to other users.
For example, have you ever considered what it is like if one's native
language for instance is *not* english?
I think it all depends on what you think the 'Most regular users' are. When
you assume they are developers, you are totally right. But I think they are
not.
Users are by default afraid to do things the wrong way. Inline hints and
tooltips, no matter how small reduce the need for a user to look things up
and make him a more confident user. And that leads to more satisfied users.
Historically the other issue has been i18n. If you have ever
developed a localised solution you will know the pain involved in
every variation you make to any label anywhere in the UI. Prior to
Fortress its been very tiresome to change labels and so we've not been
all that keen to try unless there is a very obvious need.
Yep, I know what that's like. And for some labels there is simply not enough
space to play with.
But those are minor problems. It should not be a showstopper..
In 4.0 you can provide a help title and description for any fieldset.
As of the Fortress release [1] you can provide inline documentation
for all sub-section landing pages.
Of course we're open to suggestions! Can you give examples of how you
think inline documentation would improve the UI? It may be something
we can address immediately as part of the Fortress release.
Well, see above. :-)
In the end it's all very plain and simple.
Imagine your mum needs to add a new html page to Farcry while you are away.
Where would she falter and why?
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