Thread

Hi guys,

There are a couple of important things I need to ask now that I have bought my first EE license and it’s very important to get a very considerate answer, not a commercial / sales one if you see what I mean, because I will need to chose if this platform will be used for several projects plus client work. This may mean spending several grand.

After using EE a bit I am starting to grasp the basics. I have to say that the learning curve is a bit steep and that also, in the forums there is not much answer from the EllisLab team when it comes to ‘How to’ questions. This doesn’t look great to be honest. Also, from few chats that I had there, some of my suspicions have been confirmed so I reached a point where I need to ask you clearly:

1) When I visited EE one and a half years ago I then chose to wait for the product to evolve a bit in some regards. I have to say that the product has barely changed from then and someone much more expert than me told that it’s beed quite the same for two years. Since software must evolve and the risk it to be left behind, I need to know if you guys are working on this project or if you are kind of leaving it? Are you going to Open Source it? Are you working on a version 3 considering several features requests coming in from your users?

2) Is there a chance I could get some help from the team also and not just from the community when I have ‘How to’ questions? It’s important to stress that the documentation is not great at all. You need to build some cookbook style samples, where you explain to beginners like me how to deal with real life projects. It’s not enough to ask 300 dollars and explain how to create a bunch of Example channels, statuses, categories to allow people to make good things with EE. It’s important to discuss common options, scenarios, examples in detail, not with developers jargon. Teach in a user friendly way how to go about a blog, a catalogue, a portfolio, a news website, a brochure website, approaches to e-commerce etc. etc. I know it requires resources, and this means time and costs, but this is somehow related to my first question. Are you guys focused on this project or not?? Is this software going to die slowly?

It’s VERY important to get a feel of your roadmap because these are working tools for the rest of us out here and we need to make informed decisions, especially when we have competition to beat, clients to take care and, of course, budgets to allocate.

Of course, I’m still within the 30 days, so I could get my money back and move on, but I can see the potential (and the great speed) of your product so I would first like to understand few things before making any decisions.

I hope you understand where I’m coming from.

Thanks

Hi, svedish

I see you asked some of the same questions in a sales email.

We have a very small staff overall, and we don’t typically answer HowTo questions unless they really are easy to answer. For instance, I maintain two third party sites:

http://eehowto.com

and

http://eebeginners.com

both of which I need to spend more time in adding information. We’d LOVE to be able to answer more questions, but we’re tapped out people wise for support. We do however have a number of third party helpers that assist with these kinds of questions.

I beg to differ - there have been a large number of changes, most of which you wouldn’t see if you weren’t using EE 1.x versus 2.x. One of the biggest changes is the file manager which is still adding functionality.

What kinds of items were you expecting to see in the past 1.5 years? Keep in mind our development team is about 5 full time developers.

Have you looked at http://train-ee.com ? Mike Boyink has a number of free options that will assist others in learning how to use EE.

Have you read through Lisa’s http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/the_importance_of_semantics/ series? Some of these topics are covered in them.

Ideally we’d like to have a dedicated resource to preparing better support content, but that’s not a reality right at the present.

The software isn’t dying, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve been using this software in one form or another since 2002. We’ve added additional support staff, and are hiring additional developers.

As far as a road map is concerned, we don’t normally provide one. We did start adding items on ellislab.com including this one from a few months ago.

http://ellislab.com/blog/entry/ellislab_2011/

It goes into more detail about what we’re doing.

I’ve also created a series of short videos on mostly howto subjects found on my you-tube channel which we will be expanding on.

Here’s a link to four of them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNzS7DEVPd0 - download eel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_iR5D0rCxM - renew license

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FqPdUJL91E - force query strings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW_TBhQeSCI - Turn off xss filtering
I’m going to mention this thread to Leslie to see if he wants to add additional information…

Hi Sue,

First of all, thanks for your answer. I’d say it’s a step towards something. 😊

As for answering questions, I think you nailed it in the first place. You are under staffed, but it’ very important to stress that when a product is commercial, it’s really paramount to give people all the support they need. I can’t stress this enough, really. I guess it holds true for every business out there. Especially when you sell something that has some sort of learning curve.

And as it turns out, discriminating between HowTo and technical questions falls short as well since every question can be seen as a support or HowTo one according to how you build it. If I ask something in advance (How do I build this kind of site / section) it’s a HowTo question. If I start messing around and most likely get stuck when trying to achieve the same result, I raise a support ticket. What’s the difference? It’s the same stuff. Don’t you agree? Also, you guys should read the other forums more often. I’m not the only one complaining about the same things. It’s important that you start to take it into account at some point.

That’s why we’re back to square one: staff and resources. You definitely need better documentation with a large number of good examples so people will go there and learn. You may even have a annual paid service to get HowTo support? I think it would be cool. It’s also important to notice that many resources, including the good one you point out, are mainly commercial. It’s a bit weird, with all due respect, to buy a piece of software (actually one licence of it) and get support / training from third party that ask you more money? Take the guy that did the screencasts (forgot his name), commercial. Train-ee? Mainly commercial. No doubt people turn to them when the source has poor documentation, but wouldn’t it be better if we customers could turn to the main website in order to learn about a product? I think it would be a normal scenario, nothing ground breaking if you see what I mean.

Also, about updates, first of all I’m happy the product is not abandoned and I’m happy that you are hiring. But in almost 2 years, again with all due respect, I expect to see more ‘movements’ toward a new major release. File manager features are part of most CMS modules I’ve used and it has been for years. So, possibly our friend I was chatting with in the other forum was right that the main problem has been that you’ve been focusing on the Mojo thing for a long time? By the way, we have developed something pretty much identical for a client 2 years ago. Sadly, no one else bought it! 😉 Just a nice way to say that I think EE is a very good project, with great value. I just think it deserves more focus and that it needs to be managed a little bit better and thinking a bit bigger. We can all see in 2011, with competition pushing hard to get better, that there are features to be added, things to be simplified, documentation to be made much richer and deeper.

Also, thanks for the link to the CEO report. I’ll read that with interest.

And last but definitely not least, please consider that most of the external resources have a blog / articles type of approach. When you are new to a product you don’t need that. You don’t need to go to a website to find “How to use statutes to your best advantage” or watch a video about how to setup your .htaccess. For example now the first article on EEHow says “HowTo Set the Default Status for a SafeCracker Entry” (Waht??). You barely know what a CMS is (not my case, but hopefully you see what I mean), you surely ignore know how EE works so you don’t get the big picture. You need a place where you find a complete A to Z guide about something. Something that takes you from zero to at least 6. Like your documentation, just better and with more examples. In fact I think the documentation about the Control Panel is not bad actually. It’s to the point and it explains exactly what every single command does. Also the tags documentation is not bad because it’s made in the classic developers style.
The massive problem with your documentation is the Getting Started part. That one is literally… bad, to be kind. And every newcomer doesn’t get the whole idea of it. It’s like knowing exactly what every Photoshop filter does and not knowing that PS is good for photo retouching, to work with pixel based graphics, to prepare images for the web etc., while it’s not good to work with vectors and you need Illustrator for that. Do you see what I mean? I know how to set up my .htaccess to clean urls and I still miss the idea behind the pages module and how exactly the whole URL structure works. Even after reading the page about URLs! I’m still confused.

You need to give the bigger picture and extensively explain why EE is built in a certain way, when it makes sense to use the pages module, statuses, categories, what channels really are and how they fit in this picture. How things relate to each other and hwo to apply these principles to few common web design / development scenarios. THIS is what a Getting Started documentation should do. A hundred good pages plus few dozen very good videos and you’re done.

At present the Getting Started guide tells you how to set up a bunch of Example channels, categories, statuses etc. ans after reading it you expect that to be an intro and the guide to start. The problem is that instead, it’s finished! :D

Please let me know your thoughts of course. 😊

Thanks.

And as it turns out, discriminating between HowTo and technical questions falls short as well since every question can be seen as a support or HowTo one according to how you build it.

There is certainly some judgement involved, but we’re very consistent when making that call. When we do end up moving a thread over to Community Support, we’ll clearly explain why.

The massive problem with your documentation is the Getting Started part.

We agree, and this is already a known bug. It’s an issue we’ve attacked from multiple angles, not all of which have been successful thus far. Essentially, we recognize that the Agile Records site theme we include can be improved and simplified, and we want the Getting Started guide to sync up with this improved theme. It’s a large undertaking, but we’re going to take the time to get it right. In the near future you can expect to see a revised, more organized set of documentation as well.

We really appreciate the time you’ve taken to provide feedback, and we hope you’ll “stay tuned”. Let me know if I can answer any other questions.

Hi Brandon,

No problem, I’m happy to help and I’m also happy to use a better product, if you see what I mean. I would be actually even happy to contribute to the new documentation if you need a hand.

I’ll stay tuned.

I have two forum post that have gone unanswered. I expect more after having purchased 5 EE licenses. Every forum post should be answered. So that expectation needs to be addressed. Or is this like a linux forum where every answer is Read The $&@&$ Manual?EE is a great product, but support needs to improve.

svedish,

I noticed you wrote about Michael Boyink’s paid tutorials. I am surprised anyone on our staff would send you directly to his paid tutorials. We consider Mike a Community Partner and one of the reasons why is that his Free Tutorials are hands down one of the best resources on the internet for getting started with ExpressionEngine. If you have not checked them out then I would highly recommend them. If you spent 2 days working through his tutorials I am confident that you would have a solid foundation to build on.

As the person responsible for services I have read your posts and appreciate your feedback. We are working behind the scenes to make things better but, as I am sure you are aware, it takes time. I do hope, as Brandon mentioned, that you will ‘stay tuned’. We have made some huge changes over the last couple of years and many of the changes we have made in the last 6 months are starting to pay dividends. Internally we are really excited about what the immediate future holds.

Jose,

I checked the threads that you currently have open and there are no issues open in Technical Support with your username. If you have created them in Community Help or General Discussion they will go overlooked as our focus is on the technical support issues.

If they are technical support issues and you accidentally created them in the wrong forum let me know. I will be happy to move them for you.

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for your answer. I can also understand Jose that after spending, presumably between 1000 and 1500 dollars is feeling a bit frustrated. I think it’s perfectly understandable.

Marcus I am happy you guys are moving on and I really hope you’ll get up to speed with this software, especially with the support and the learning materials.

The reason I tell you this is that I’ve doing web for nearly 15 years and I’ve got custom CMS developed from scratch for clients with inline editing (loved it but pointless, they keep calling you to know how to rename a file, what’s the point then?), I’ve been hand coding websites, I’ve been using (in mixed chronological order 😛) Mambo, PHPbb, OSCommerce (what a piece of c@&%!^) ZenCart (a table less piece of c@&%!^) SimpleMachines, WP (very good but not flexible enough and some times slow as hell), LiveType (half decent) Drupal (good, but slow and you need an addon even to set up the website title), Joomla (the biggest piece of c@&%!^ of all). I could go on… 😊

I can tell you, in my view at least, your software has two major and important strengths:
1) it’s fast
2) it’s flexible

But it’s not 2003 anymore and I think you’ll need to seriously sort out some common needs (editor, menus, simplify structure (why groups for everything), documentation, support, etc). After that you’ll be back in the driving seat and, if I can dare suggest, if you lower the price of your product a little bit, you’ll gain much more market and every similar piece of software out there, Open Source or not, will have a hard time. Very hard!

Good luck. 😉

Even the longest journey starts with just one step. Given the infinitely variable destinations of every user, quite apt really 😊

I’ve been hand coding websites, I’ve been using (in mixed chronological order 😛) Mambo, PHPbb, OSCommerce (what a piece of c@&%!^) ZenCart (a table less piece of c@&%!^) SimpleMachines, WP (very good but not flexible enough and some times slow as hell), LiveType (half decent) Drupal (good, but slow and you need an addon even to set up the website title), Joomla (the biggest piece of c@&%!^ of all). I could go on… 😊

Can’t believe after tackling all that, you’re struggling to get started with EE. Really can’t.
Anyway, why not have a look at Ryan Irelan’s screencasts explaining how to build a newspaper website in EE from scratch:
http://mijingo.com/products/screencasts/learning-expressionengine-2-complete-series/
may just be the kickstart you need to get you going.

Hi,

Wow! that was an old post, but it’s nice to see that it still drives some attention. I am not sure I said I was struggling to get started, but thanks for the pointer. I’ll have a look at this video. I also bought another one months ago and it was pretty good.

Anyway, the website I bought the license for has been up and running for a long time now and I’m quite pleased. Not entirely though because this product needs improvement in my opinion, so most of what I said is still what I think about it.

In the meanwhile they improved the documentation. Maybe I was right, as other people, in pointing out that it was appalling for a newcomer? 😉

Cheers! 😊