First off I promise I’m not just trying to get the Senior Member tag next to my name by posting a lot 😉
This thread spawned from this technical support thread.
It is a fairly frequent occurrence, that I search through the documentation, reading everything I can find on some module or functionality of expression engine before turning to the forums to ask a question, resulting in information that the answer I seek is located in the wiki or in the knowledge blog. Admittedly, this is partly my fault as if I had run a search in the forums I may very well have ended up with the result as forum search covers the knowledge blog and wiki as well. However, the forum search has rarely helped me find the answer I was looking for when I used it, and to be fair I’ve just spend an hour or two in the documentation trying to find my answer.
I should learn and be more thorough in my search, but it isn’t natural for me to work that way, and that makes me think it probably isn’t for at least a few other people. This leads me to the following suggestions:
1) It would be great to have links for related knowledge blog and wiki entries automatically inserted at the bottom of pages of documentation. (It seems like categories or other built-in expression engine features should make this fairly trivial to achieve, and would lead people to the right places without the need of human (read Lisa) intervention. Lisa could then save enough time to build a to-scale replica of the eiffel tower out of matchsticks, or whatever it is that Lisa likes to do in her spare time.
2) It would be really nice if there were options for what the search in the documentation pages covered, similarly to the forum search. It seems like adding checkboxes next to the search box allowing you to enable searching the knowledge blog, wiki, and forum at the same time as you search the docs would be fairly trivial. (maybe not though, I couldn’t immediately figure out how to specify more than one site: in a google search)
3) Cross Linking module specific things in the documentation for the module itself. Follwoing the don’t repeat yourself mantra, I’ll quote from the thread that lead to this one:
Did you really think everyone was going to go pore through the weblog entries tag page to see if there might be some new parameters related to the pages module? It would be, I think, completely reasonable given the fact that those three parameters are only available when the pages module is installed to have a little blurb on the pages module documentation display page something like this:
The pages module introduces two new weblog:entries tag variables ({page_uri} and
{page_url}) and one new parameter (show_pages). Please see the appropriate page in the weblog:entries documentation for more details.Conversation continued at the new thread, I’ll add a link when I’ve finished writing it.
4) a discussion forum thread assigned to each page of the documentation would allow similar gains to those PHP gains from the comments in it’s documentation, as well as getting new people introduced to what a fantastic tool the forum is right from the get go.
I’ve got a lot more, but I’ll put a cork in it here, as I still have a lot to do before I can go home today.
I hope this helps. It isn’t meant as a whine session, but as constructive ideas for how Ellis Labs might better help EE users find the information they need to use the software effectively.