Hello,
I saw some other threads talking about forum organization, but I decided to start a thread to ask a question and vent a little.
My main question is, Where do I find the Discussion Module for EE2?. I’ve spent over 30 minutes going through the website and to no avail. I came on the forums, and I see people having problems with the v3 of the module, but can’t find it anywhere.
This leads me to my core problem, that is organization of the new website. It took me a whole day to realize there were add-ons on the website. I thought EE just got rid of it and I looked everywhere. So finally I just started googling and found devot-ee and NWS and Pixel and Tonic, and a few other sites. Then I went ahead and purchase/downloaded the essential plugins I needed.
I feel like the new website is very badly organized (in some areas). It isn’t easy to find add-ons at all. When I finally realized I had to click my own logged in name to see the tiny ‘Downloads’ button, I was extremely disappointed at what it lead me to. I guess maybe devote-ee is to replace the page? I really don’t know, but if it is, the whole section, in my opinion, needs to be more prominent and accessible. Now that I know it is there, sure, it is easy to find, but I’m telling you it took me over a day to figure it out (and I’ve been using EE for over 2 years). I feel like it is a little bit of a cop-out to have a small link to devote-ee there, that I overlooked, and then list out the plugins in a way that makes it very hard to find ones for EE1 vs. EE2. Either remove the section and make it easy to get to devote-ee, or make the section useable. It is confusing for people who don’t realize devote-ee is the new place to go instead of expressionengine.com (I’m still puzzled by the seperation).
My second big annoyance is that I can’t find what EE2 does better than EE1. When asking support about this, there isn’t any type of document or anything like that to explain. So I am left wondering why I should upgrade from 1.6 to 2, and what 2 will really give me. I ended up having to install 2 for myself just to see, but besides looking good (and of course using codeigniter) I still don’t know exactly what feature requests were implemented and what was improved on the productivity/functionality standpoint. Again, I looked all over the website but failed in finding anything useful. It is like EE1 didn’t exist, but for the hundreds of websites that use it and are thinking of upgrading, or the dozens of developers that use EE as a platform and want to know what version to use for future projects, it is ambiguous.
I guess for me, I have been waiting for EE2 for a looooong time. We waited past all the missed launch dates, then waited through beta. During that wait, all our feature requests were replied with, “We’re working on EE2, so we won’t add anything to EE1, but be sure to check out EE2,” but then EE2 comes and either the features aren’t there, or there is no indication that they are there, leaving us puzzled as to why we were waiting.
Continuing my rant goes to redundancies in the navigation like ‘Community’ and ‘Forums’. I understand they link to different things on first click, but to see Add-ons almost hidden on the site, then two sections that are basically the same thing makes me wonder, why? The community page, in my opinion, is really unappealing because it is just a whole bunch of separate information put into one long page. Why not break it into more pages to make it easier to understand the point of the page? People really don’t want to scroll to the bottom to find information that should be in its own subpage within the section. Anyway, I’m mentioning this just to illustrate why I am lost and why I’m a bit disappointed in what I’ve seen come with EE2.
Lastly, is the forums. I’m really lost here. We’re working on another client’s site, decided to use EE2 just to give it a shot since using it is the only way to know what the different is. So when I came on the forums, after the EE2 changes, I was left not knowing what to do. I guess maybe all questions go to the Technical Support? And the rest of the forums I just ignore? As someone that used to use the old forums a lot, and help people, and get help from people, the new forum really is only the Technical Support section. There is a bunch of fluff, stuff I can’t help but ignore, but what’s the real intent of the forums now? There is a big Community button (which I spoke about above) in the mainnav of the site, but the forums do not reflect this anymore.
So far I’m liking EE2, just because I like pretty and nice looking things. It has some cool things like the redesign, the new organization, the ability to modify the Publish pages, but besides that… I can only hope that the usage of CI will allow me to build my own add-ons very easily. I was so disheartened by the letdown of no wysiwyg editor (which was hinted at and even discussed as something we’d get) and even more letdown by having to purchase wygwam from Pixel & Tonic to get what I had in EE1…
But before this goes into discussing the product, my point of this thread was to discuss the website/forums and lack of information and access to help that I have outlined above. I think I’d enjoy EE2 a lot more if my first week of using it wasn’t wasting precious time trying to figure out how it is different from EE1 and making posts like this.
And to end, don’t get me wrong, I am an EE fan. We use EE for many client projects, so everything I am saying is not to bash EE, but hopefully to express to the EE team the frustrations of a customer who has worked with EE for over 2 years and built out more than a dozen professional sites using it.
Thank you for reading 😊
P.S. if you forgot my original question, and the reason why I made this thread, please let me know where I can find Discussion Module for EE2.