Thread

I see the new wiki home page is already up. Woo-hoo!

Major kudos to the EE wunderminds for responding so quickly. As the squeaky wheel who started all this, I think this is a large step in the right direction.

Thanks for all you do!

FWIW, I also had a hard time as a new user of EE and visitor to the site/forums.  I feel mostly comfortable navigating around now, after a year or so, but I’ve never really appreciated the difference between the KB and the Wiki until now, so I’m glad Derek chimed in to answer.  I also still don’t really understand the difference between a module, an extension, a plugin and an add-on, but I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed!

This may sound ridiculous but, even as visually distinct as the KB/Wiki are, maybe a “Nav for Dummies” intro at the top of the page?  As in, “The knowledge base is maintained by EllisLab as a resource for developers” and “The Wiki is where posters are encouraged to share their insights,” etc.  Some things are never too obvious..

Kudos to the EE dev team for listening to its users and rapid responses!

You might find Lodewijk Schutte’s EE Search Bookmarklet useful for searching the EE site with Google’s help.

I had a bit of a play around with Google’s Custom Search Engines and produced one for the ExpressionEngine support resources, which also includes documentation and tutorials from 3rd party sites like solspace and jambor-ee:

ExpressionEngine Google Custom Search Engine

Hopefully it is worth bookmarking. Come to think of it, it could probably be made into a bookmarklet like Lodewijk’s. You may also add it to your personalised Google home page, or via a widget to your own site.

I’m not sure whether there are any limits from Google in terms of number of daily searches as there are with their search API.

Oh yeah, I hot-linked an EE logo from the expressionengine.com home page. Hope you don’t mind. 😊

——————

On the subject of Wiki versus Knowledge Base etc. I’ve never found either to be particularly user-friendly.

I tend to think wikis are inherently difficult to navigate. I don’t really know what the difference between these two pages is supposed to be for instance:

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Special:Categories
http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Special:Titles/category/

And what’s all this business about choosing a namespace?

In fairness the Wiki will stand and fall on whether the community engages with it and starts to write up how-to’s and tutorials and forum thread summaries.

The Knowledge Base seems fundamentally about pre-emptively answering important and common questions. It’s a bit odd therefore that there is a category called ‘Frequently Asked Questions’. They all appear to be FAQs to me.

From the point of view of distinguishing the different support sections from each other it seems odd that the icons used on this page: http://expressionengine.com/support/ are not carried through to the respective sections. Are they just eye-candy? It’s probably fair to say that they are generic icons that don’t really do a good enough job of identifying themselves with their respective support resources. Perhaps EllisLab should commission some bespoke icons for the site.

No one seems to have picked up on this but I created an updated Rollyo engine that searches all resources -

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/27226/#326963