User documentation vs. technical documentation?

Author Message

Birger Kollstrand

Saturday 17 December 2005 5:06:16 am

Hi,

I am quite a newbee on ez and up until now I have always used the admin user when writing content.

Now I was going to add a few "Editors", that was not to bad. But now I am struggeling to understand how the "Editors" are meant to be used.

Should they log inn on the normal link or on the admin link?

An generally, is there a more generall user documentation that I have not found? So far I have found a lot of information on the technical tidbits. But now I just need to know how to get different users going.

Regards Birger
www.linær.no
www.linar.no (for users with old browsers)

Felipe Jaramillo

Monday 19 December 2005 12:45:10 pm

This is a good point Birger.

eZ publish needs a user documentation with tutorials and simple to understand language to be used by editors and authors.

Maybe we can work on some screencasts in the future to illustrate some basic concepts.

Regards,
Felipe

Felipe Jaramillo
eZ Certified Extension Developer
http://www.aplyca.com | Bogotá, Colombia

Gabriel Ambuehl

Monday 19 December 2005 12:47:17 pm

I'd suggest Flash tutorials even. Check out Wink and related stuff!

Visit http://triligon.org

Per-Espen Kindblad

Monday 19 December 2005 3:06:28 pm

Hi!

3 books/paperbacks are available at (url removed). I've searched for this type of documentation for a long time without success. Therefore I decided to gather docs in 3 books/paperbacks which are now launched.

Hope this can help you into the world of eZ publish! :)

Mark Marsiglio

Monday 19 December 2005 5:25:06 pm

Unfortunately, I think it will be harder to teach my users norwegian than to teach them eZ!

Does anyone know of a similar resource in English?

http://www.thinkcreative.com
Turning Ideas Into Strategic Solutions

Per-Espen Kindblad

Tuesday 20 December 2005 1:01:31 am

I'm working on the translations now. Finished in a week or so.

Per-Espen

Andrew Kelly

Tuesday 20 December 2005 3:50:21 am

Hey, if anybody is taking requests:
;-)

I'd love to have proper user tutorials on:

-- creating a multiplexor workflow
as an example, something like:
approve-publish ->
notify-all-users-in-group-X-after-publish ->
hide-oldest-item-in-folder-where-just-published

-- creating independant multiple notification events
for example permitting users to select a weekly digest for content A
AND a daily digest for contents B and C,
AND running a daily digest for content D for all users in group X

-- sorting user registration requests
for example automatically placing registations that only request subscriptions into group X which already has roles set, and all other registration requests into group Y which requires administrative approval and reassignment.

These are 3 things that pretty much any non-trivial site will require, and for which I have yet to find any good documentation. The eZ gurus deal with this every project and will undoubtedly just re-use code from thier own librarys. But anybody fresh to eZ (a non-trivial number) will have to re-invent the wheel so to speak, and ends up fighting a rather frustrating battle because of the lack of any information other than the most rudimentary in nature.

Yes, there are examples. Workflows for instance have a very clear example of how to install approval for content publishing. Lovely. Lovely, that is, if there will only ever be one instance of which content is to be published in which section and approved by which users. As soon as needs change to even this simple scenario:
User A must approve Content Class A in Section A, and
User B must approve Content Class A in Section B
the example becomes unusable.

I'm sure any 5 posters here could spend 10 minutes typing and we'd suddenly have several dozen such examples.

If there will never be extensive user documentation offered by the company eZ (regardless of the reasoning) then perhaps it should be offered by the community eZ. I personally already look forward to making my contributions, but that is a good quarter year away. At the moment I have horrid deadlines, angry employers, high blood pressure, no documentation, and half a dozen problems that I am certain have been solved cleanly by about 100 different people in the last 18 months.

Andy
--

Per-Espen Kindblad

Tuesday 20 December 2005 4:16:04 am

I agree. There should be better documentation on this CMS, but I've been waiting since the release of 3.0.x for this, with answers that it will come, but I haven't seen anything.

Therefore I started to use mye evenings and nights writing usermanuals for users and administrators, and have also collected the most common asked questions from this forum which I can see appears again and again, and also written solutions to many other important questions. Unfortunately this information is only available in norwegian for the moment, but the english version is ready in a week.

"Solutions - the 100 most common eZ publish questions and explanations" (released in english) is a great paperback which I've already used a lot of times myself after I finished writing it. This book/paperback has a great index and it's very well structured.

Btw. if you are a developer or you need developers for your project, you can register here:
(url removed). I think this is a site which can be very interesting for ez-developers who need a job/want to get project experience, and for companies which search for eZ-developers.

Per-Espen

Per-Espen Kindblad

Tuesday 20 December 2005 7:22:06 am

The english and german version is finished in about a week.

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