Armand Verstappen wrote:
>> So thanks for all you have done to date, and I look forward to seeing and
>> experiencing the Midgard Way! I don't know if I can be of any help, but
>
> if I
>
>> can get through the 1.4 upgrade, and begin to learn what I can do with
>> Midgard, then I will be happy to help in my nontechie way ;-)
>
>
> This post is a great help. Us techies need to have our eyes (re)opened to
> the nontechie point of view now and then. Much in the same way it is hard
> for you to keep up with our technical approach, it is hard for us to
> envision the wishes of the newby and nontechie user. But be assured that
> we are targeting at all levels of users, and that we welcome any comment
> that could improve the product.
> As always you are welcome to call for help with your upgrade to 1.4, and
> I hope you will help by pointing out our weaknesses as you experience
> them
>
> Armand.
For what it's worth, I'm not at all a newbie in many regards, but in CMS
and Midgard, and PHP, and even Apache to some extent, it's all new to
me. The general stuff (compiling, tweaking, patching, packaging, etc.)
I have no trouble with. But the paradigm of Midgard is something new
and confusing. I think it's the route we're going to go for our new
company website (the other contenders are Zope and HTML::Mason--but
Midgard, in my limited view, seems more Right than those two, even
though I prefer perl to PHP), but I'm going to have to understand it
better before I can actually use it to try it.
Something that seems to be lacking, from my point of view, is a
step-by-step, hands-on tutorial (with lots of screenshots and clear
explanations--but without being wordy or inconcise) for taking a working
Midgard server, and putting up a website with it.
The install is pretty well documented already...though some of the docs
are inaccurate and the RPM's could use some work (I'd volunteer but my
hands are already full with other projects at the moment--but I did
build new, and up to date RPM's of all required packages that are a
little more reasonable, and seem to work on my system, so I'll post
those somewhere soon). But the leap from a working system to a working
website is a very difficult one at the moment. If I didn't know better
(if I were a newbie who couldn't track down actual system problems
pretty quickly) I would assume my system just isn't installed correctly
or that Midgard is broken. Because I can't, for the life of me, get a
website generated and running. The docs seem very "concept" oriented
rather than "action" oriented, thus I don't know what actions to take to
make it work.
At this point, I can't even figure out what to do first. Do I create a
new SiteGroup, then some users, then some pages....how? And what is a
Realm in a SiteGroup? And then what? The icons are almost meaningless
and only labelled on the frontpage...I need a few pointers. I thought
if I pointed and clicked and read the manual long enough a page would
appear--but it didn't happen.
I guess the point that I'm trying to make is that I've made my way
through a good part of the documentation (Chapter 8) and still don't
know what the heck I'm doing! ;-) I don't want to seem like I'm
attacking the documentation, as it is mostly very concise and well
written. It just doesn't tell me what I need to know, which is how to
make a basic website "Go" with Midgard in a couple of hours.
Other than that, it's perfect! ;-) Really, I hate for my very first
post to be an all-out assault, and it isn't really. It's just an
impassioned plea for a little more "Do this, then this, and finally
this" documentation.
So how's that for a newbie /and/ techie point of view?
--
Joe Cooper <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Affordable Web Caching Proxy Appliances
http://www.swelltech.com
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
