Joss

ah, yes ... I had a bit of idle time on my hands .....

Oh, go on, punish them ... make them type it!!! No, you are right, of course ....

One of the most interesting things about ProcessWire for me is that you really can sit down and design an HTML site, then reverse it into ProcessWire. That is something that needs to be flagged up with all types of docs. By the way, can you set up the forum? How about: Documentation Project --- Book, --- Online Documentation Project, --- Wiki --- Translations That way, the broader community can stick ideas into the right holes! In the nicest way, of course. The last one I just thought of and is me thinking ahead a bit. At the moment this is predominantly an English Language project, but there are already users from all over the place; in the future, some may well want to take growing documentation and translate it. So, this might have use. Joss

I agree with this. It is the same trouble that I have with Video tutorials - video is a great way of giving overviews and showing what is possible and even how easy something is, but it really does not replace the written word. Having said that - being able to download things like a library of snippets used is rather nice - but that should be part of the online docs anyway. Joss

Arf'noon Soma Oh, no, I haven't forgotten the cheat sheet - and that should make up part of any online system where it can be used as much as a cross referencing index as anything else. And .... Er. I think I said all the newbie stuff in my long post up there ↑ But yes - I think the Book is particularly well suited to taking people who have basically an html/css understanding (not expert, but can work through it) and then taking them bit by bit through the rest. However, as I said a couple of posts ago, it needs to be laid out in such a way so if the actually know the technique, they can easily skip it without losing their place. One of the big pit falls of many of the books out their (even the properly published and edited ones) is that if you miss a section because you know how to do a foreach loop, for instance, you suddenly find that within that bit there was also something important that you DIDN'T know. So, getting that right is important. By the way, I see nothing wrong with teaching good PHP practice using PW as the tutorial stage. Good marketing that! Joss

Er ... well you are the Admin! Go and create it!

I Lucas, I do this in my tutorial. http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/Basic_Website_Tutorial It shows you how to create the fields, template and page, and then how to integrate that into your site. On a site I am working on at the moment, I have even included things like banner background colours, blocks, meta data, and tons of SEO useful stuff .

Oh, missed the "Contents Page" bit. So .... Forward (by Ryan - why he made PW, short history) Stepping Stones - How to cross the river using PW. Basically, how PW uses the relationships between pages and templates to allow you to find your own path and create solid applications and websites. Quick - do something before it gets boring! A bit like the Planets Tutorial, this is a short, silly one page site that proves the system is actually working. Overview of the learning process - How this book will work, what steps it will take you through, what experience you need (not much) and what you should get out of it. Creating the Tutorial Site - Effectively this is the tutorial I have just written on the Wiki, but more nicely laid out. It creates the basic starter site that the reader will use for all subsequent tutorials and explains some of the most commonly used techniques. From that point on the book gets more and more complicated. Every technique is explained via a proper working example added on to the core Tutorial Site. The reason for doing this is that the writers CANNOT shortcut and suddenly assume that the reader can read their minds. It also means nothing is suddenly in isolation and is not properly explained. These should not just be about creating things like galleries, forms and so on, but about how to manipulate data - a basic accounts system, a complex directory system, a forum built using ProcessWIre? If it is possible, we should demonstrate at least the basic building blocks. The latter half of the book would have a lot of reference material (different coloured pages, in an ideal world): The Data Model - a full description of how the data structure works, why it is designed like that and how it can be used to meet high standards of data integrity and portablity. This should also include best practices for creating fields that that keep associations between types of data without over fragmenting. (For instance, if you have a field called article_body, it makes sense to use it for anything that could properly be called an article, but would not make sense to use it as a description field for a product listing) The API Snippets reference - this would possibly be repeats from within all the tutorial text, repackaged and represented as a reference (an electronic version would do some of this automatically, I suppose) Index ... and so on. Another thought: Is PW enterprise ready? If so, that is an issue that should be looked at separately, since that sort of audience would need a different approach. Possibly not yet .... but maybe worth planning for. Joss

Pete, you are spot on. As a sound engineer and advertising producer/copywriter over the years, every product launch I was involved in never happened until the the user manual was completed - even if that was just how many spoons of the product you put into your tea cup! It was right up there on the top of the todo list. Open source products have a huge problem with documentation. The first is unsolvable: Any product that is basically one person working on the project more or less as a hobby (they have a full time job) and not having any proper way to finance it, simply is not in the position to write a full, properly crafted, user manual on top of the basic technical documentations. As a one-person cottage industry they quite possibly don't have the skill-set either; Ryan has good communication skills, but that is rare. Just to compound the problem, there is a high chance that they don't speak the most useful language, English, as a native language. (To be honest, some of the stuff I have read over the years sounds like someone struggling with the language, only for me to discover that they ARE English!!!) The second is a sort of bad habit .... the more users you get, and therefore the more experienced users you have, the larger the group gets that doesn't have a need for a proper user guide/book. The trouble is that it is easy to forget that you have a growing number of users on the periphery that are simply struggling, that really could do with the help/education. Even wonderful cross-referenced documentation (some people have listed some great examples that they have found) does not do it. That comes into play once you have really got your head into the system and now need to know how to programme up those one thousand and one ideas you have just had. So, I agree. A book. And you could go the whole way here - a proper book. There are several advantages: Those that are involved in writing it can get a little bit of income from their hard work. (probably not very much!) The project itself can get a small amount of finance from the publication. It becomes a marketing tool that by being promoted, promotes the initial project. By making the system incredibly accessible to a huge range of people with different skill levels, it broadens out the user base, which inevitably promotes the project again, with all the spin offs that can engender. So, three sets of information. 1. Core Documentation Definitely free - built on the API (or expanded from it), that gives basic examples in a small chunk fashion. Matthew Scheneker has started playing with an idea using PW for that, which could be interesting. 2. Basic Start tutorial Free again - a walk through on the lines that I have been playing with on the Wiki that takes the user from nothing to a fully working site with a couple of tricky bits thrown in. 3. A complete book Probably sold through something like Manning or Kindle, that not only takes the user on a journey using ProcessWire from just listing planets to creating full, complex applications, but also teaches them the basic PHP/PW knowledge they need to achieve that. The only assumption it would make about the user is that they have some basic working CSS/HTML knowledge and are keen to learn using good working practices. This sort of book does not need to alienate the more advanced user (very, very advanced users probably would not buy the book anyway), because it can be structured and laid out with sidebars and so on that can be skipped by those who "know how to do that." As someone who would benefit from such a book, I would also be very interested in collaborating on it with someone who had all the necessary technical knowledge.... (hint) Is ProcessWire ready for this? If I look back over the last 15 years or so of playing with the internet I do seem to crop up in a rather large number of forums, beta testing lists, the odd article and so on .... Can be quite embarrassing (and thank goodness most of those have vanished along with the projects) .... . So maybe I have a little more industry experience than I sometimes admit too.... purely from the edges, you understand. (and it is true about having bugger all programming skills!) So, I was reading a long forum post on the Symphony forums from 2011 by Ryan - http://getsymphony.com/discuss/thread/79645/ - which included a little bit of the History and gave me a little more insight into the product and it's creator than I got here. My gut feeling is that PW as a concept and an application is well and truly ready for the big time. But some of the bits that surround it (official knowledge base, outside user knowledge, expansions) are not quite ready. But all that means is that this it the time to do them, not that PW should wait for them. I think a book should be written by a couple of idiots, that the community should get behind more docs and stretching the API out to its logical conclusion, that more people should be encouraged to create modules (with some good, strong QA behind the system), and that LOADS more profiles should be created or donated (or even sold!) that can show what it possible and can be used as learning structures. There you go Pete - you asked the question, and that was my short little answer .... Joss

Ah, you should have tried adding bacon. It often helps with liver. Joss

Would that go in the Root Canal of your website .....?

What is probably needed is a permissions map where you can look at all permissions belonging to a group or a single user. So, you could show permissions for a group for templates - then either change permissions individually or select the entire lot (or multi select some of them) and change the permissions. Probably hell to programme, but as PW sites get more adventurous and larger, possibly very useful.

The main reason I have been playing with Bootstrap was that once I started with it, I thought I should really get right through it. Initially I was worried by the "Bootstrap Look" that some complain about. But then I realised that was rediculous - I could make it do what I liked really. The other thing is that it is continually developed and they seem to address concerns and wishes fairly quickly, which is encouraging. One thing I have found which might be of interest to Admin Template developers here is a Bootstrap theme for JQuery UI http://addyosmani.github.com/jquery-ui-bootstrap/ I haven't tried it at all, I should point out. Also, which may be of interest to form lovers, is the Bootstrap version of the wysihtml5 editor http://jhollingworth.github.com/bootstrap-wysihtml5/ Somewhere between those two could be something rather interesting, I suspect. Joss

Okay, I have been playing with MediaWiki:Common.css - fun! I have increased the font size from 0.8em to 0.85em I have added a bit more line height to h2, h3, h4 and h5 I have added more bottom margin to P I have indented UL a little more I have added a drop shadow to the TOC, images and my side bar template. (you can override it on images by wrapping them in <span class="nostyle></span>) I have put a dotted line round the code and added a bit more background colour. So, hopefully it should be a bit more readable now! Time for lunch. Joss

Ta - I will add to the text. Mind you, it is dangerous if you did not know this! (Like wot I didn't)

Editing my wiki tutorial (I mean my tutorial on the wiki, not about it), I was just thinking about linking in advance of having a page. On Mediawiki, you can link to a non-existent page which at least might prompt someone to go and create the page, assuming they see the red link. On Google Sites you go one stage further. When inserting a link, you can choose from an existing page, or create a new page. Choosing the latter option creates the page then links to it - though you are not taken to the page and the new, empty page is not flagged up. This sort of functionality is very useful, but I think could go even further. So, you are writing an article and want to cross link it to another article that does not as yet exist. 1. You use the linking system and like Google you can either link to an existing article (or category too), or create a new article. 2. You give the article a name and (optionally) associate it with one or more existing categories. (In PW, you probably also choose a Template or it falls back to a default template) 3. The article is created (and the link completed), but it is flagged as an Empty Article automatically - maybe made a member of an Empty Article Category. In the admin area (or where ever the article writing is taking place) a list of empty articles is kept - nice and prominent so that contributing authors know they need to be worked on. The same flagging should also apply to any articles where the author is looking for help or a collaborator and so on. Joss

HI ziusurda When you are looking through the Database itself, one thing worth noting is because each field you create in the Admin (Setup > Fields) has its own table, the data stored is very clean. This makes it very easy to deal with in your Template File in the /site/templates/ directory of your installation. Any stylisation is up to you. It is also worth noting that the DB structure allows every field to be reusable. They are not permanently associated to one particular template, but can be associated with many. So, you may create an article_meta_keywords field that you want to use in lots of different templates since it is a very common element. When you create a template in the backend, you can add whatever fields you like from the drop down list, so this is not only possible, but very useful! I have just written a full tutorial that explains some of these issues. It sounds like you may not need to do the entire thing, but reading it through might put some of this into context. http://wiki.processwire.com/index.php/Basic_Website_Tutorial I am still cleaning it up, but a lot of the info is there! Please let me know if there is anything in it you find confusing - I will sort it out. Joss

What you could do is steal this as a starting point and take it a different direction. If you look at the discussions page for the article, I have put a short list of tutorials that could be added to this base tutorial - many more could be added, I am sure! Each one needs to work within the framework of the base tutorial and not conflict with each other. A reader could eventually end up with a site that does all kinds of things - all from the single starting tutorial. That keeps the lessons consistent and makes more sense. However, I don't know enough to write a lot of this! I agree with the wiki layout. I am currently going through the article shoving in line breaks everywhere! However, the plan is to eventually do a proper docs site with PW (of course), but the wiki is a really good way of getting things written down and categorised in the mean time. A great staging area for articles. Joss

http://www.pebblesthepuppy.co.uk weni, widi, weewee I came, I saw .... I did something unspeakable on the carpet...

Hi diogo, that is the way I have been going - though I am not sure if I have been very consistent!

Okay, that was just an excuse to get back at me about my dog!! Claudio, thanks a million for doing that. I can now go through and fine tune. Yeah, I hesitated using the term. I have been struggling with the term "template" a bit - not that its the wrong term but it applies in so many ways in PW: It is the files that are responsible for the display It is the process of grouping fields It it the controller that dictates how the page creation system works (limiting what children/parents can do, for instance) And it is the more philosophical idea of a particular content idea. When you chat, it is fine. But from the writing point of view, where the ideas need to be clear and well differentiated, it is a bit of a headache. I will be going through the article again this morning, so I will be looking at those issues and try and clarify it. Thanks to both of you! Joss

Love it! Yes, I am getting stuck on Bootstrap now - I find it so easy to use (which for me is a bleedin' miracle!) Joss

Looking at a couple of the examples above, I quite like the Kendo UI landing page. The four big buttons immediately make you react depending on your ability and/or experience. That is important for any documentation I feel. I have always liked the idea of layering things starting with the simplest answer first: What is a domestic cat? Layer 1: A small Furry animal Layer 2: A small predatory mammal of the cat family Layer 3: A quadruped of the family mammalia and species Felidae that is commonly kept as a domestic pet .... And so on. Basically the idea is that the first level answers a question with a solution rather than a full explanation, but each further layer adds more to the detail of the explanation for those who want or need to know those details. But if you are not interested, Layer 1 would give you and answer and possibly something you can copy and paste. I have to admit I have never actually tried out this idea ... but I have been talking about it for years!

Good question - another one could be whether the password should be time limited? So it will work for 48 hours then become obsolete, for example.

That was quick! Thanks! I think the main thing is to actually download a fresh copy of PW and see if it actually works! It should - I mean I actually did the site in sync with writing the tutorial, but there is always some trap somewhere. ....