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The documentation is in my opinion pretty thorough and clearly written. 20% or so more detail would be good. I guess what you are asking for is a tutorial as authoritative as the documentation.

I understand that. Documentation is fine once you get it, but in order to get it you need to be taken by the hand and led, starting with a Hello World example and then a simple blog, etc. I’m not sure if such a thing exists, but any number of people, myself included, could write it.

Someone started an excellent one for a church site but I forget who, and I’m not sure if he completed it.

The documentation is in my opinion pretty thorough and clearly written. 20% or so more detail would be good. I guess what you are asking for is a tutorial as authoritative as the documentation.

I understand that. Documentation is fine once you get it, but in order to get it you need to be taken by the hand and led, starting with a Hello World example and then a simple blog, etc. I’m not sure if such a thing exists, but any number of people, myself included, could write it.

Someone started an excellent one for a church site but I forget who, and I’m not sure if he completed it.

Information is useless without context. The context is poorly conveyed. It is, of course, harder to convey the more abstract concepts where explaining that a tag grabs X imnformation is easy.

This has most likely been posted before, but there are some video tutorials on EE’s site itself.
http://expressionengine.com/tutorials/

I’m not sure if this is totally on topic, but I find the current documentation to be a little cumbersome as well.  I think I’ve got the basics, but trying to find out how to do something new is more difficult.  I think the problem stems from there being 4 different places to go look for a solution.  (oh and what’s the difference between a wiki and a knowledge base? to me they seem to be the same concept, user submitted docs).

In my opinion I would like to see just two places to look, docs, and forums.  If it is written up to be a wiki or a knowledge base, then it ought to be included in the docs.

Also docs need to be cross linked, and then cross linked again, followed by another dose of cross linking.  I know this is a time consuming thing to do.  Maybe you could open up a user suggested cross links similar to comments.  (Oh and don’t make such a high hurdle of 100 posts + license) to be able to add a cross link.

So, these are my suggestions for starting with EE:

1) Think about what your site will display.  What is dynamic and will change?  What will be dynamic in the sense of a fixed set of choices (navigation menus, etc), and what is genuinely new content?

2) Design starter content: Start out designing your main weblogs.  What fields, what categories, etc.  Put in some starter content, too.

3) Design some templates.  You can pick some predesigned ones, it doesn’t matter.  What kind of look do you want your site to have?  Where there is supposed to be dynamic content, put “Tag here” or something.

4) implement your first tags.  Don’t implement them all at once—start with the main content.  Note down what tags you are using—chances are, that same tag with it’s options will be used alot, with varying parameters. 

5) test. 

After it works, go on and Flesh out other tags, more weblogs, etc.  Keep going until it is done. 

Works for me!

Thanks SO much! I think for me what has been missing from the documentation is a workflow.  Even if there is more than “one way to skin a cat” in EE, a basic workflow will help the newbie get going.  Thanks for this post.  This is what many of us are looking for.  This will help many of us get to the “lightbulb moment” faster. 😊

EE is a strange beast.  It is ridiculously powerful… though I’m looking forward to adding CI into the mix. 

It is not, for me, a “beginner” CMS.  Let’s look at my own example.  I started out being thrust into running websites. Being the techie guy, I was on the hook.  I picked another CMS, a paid one, even.  That one has a lot to recommend it, to this day over EE.  Why?  It’s easier for “beginners.”  It has lots of themes, and I could modify a theme easier than write one.  To this day, I’m horrible at css and web design.  I do more php and coding. 

But while that CMS offers theme switching, once you get off the reservation, so to speak, things got hard, fast.  I was restricted in lots of what I wanted to do.  Enter EE.

That says more about the “good and bad” of EE than anything I’ve read. EE’s documentation is very good once you “get” how EE works. Up to that point EE can be highly confusing, more so when compared with other popular pseudo CMS apps such as Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, et al.

If you’re horrible at XHTML, CSS, layout and design, EE is not a fun place to start because all that is required in the Templates area. If you’re into PHP and love to code, but don’t care for layout and design, then reservations like Joomla, WordPress, et al, are a fun place to work.

However, “once you get off the reservation” those other CMS apps are not so much fun, while EE allows you to create a highly complex, attractive, secure, dependable, very flexible web site WITHOUT knowing anything about coding other than how to spell PHP.

Templates and the {embed} tag are worth their weight in gold. EE also requires developers (coders and designers) to think better, to think multidimensionally, to really work to balance XHTML, CSS, EE’s tags with modern designs. Not so with so many other CMS apps.

I would like to see EE 2.0 have a true “default” setting which would allow for true site design themes, ala Joomla/WordPress, with designs that could change in look and feel through multiple CSS options. The “default” setting could be a basic weblog with Title, Summary, Body, and basic settings. Themes could be anchored to the default settings.

That would go a long way toward easing new users into EE’s basics. Once a newbie “gets it” (usually it’s just how templates, embeds, and tags work) then they can modify themes until cows come home.

You may [or may not!] find this helpful: ‘an intro to EE’ [pdf]

It was written for v1.5, but since it’s about the EE fundamentals it should still be applicable.  I wrote it after my first EE site, while the learning curve was still fresh in my mind - I tried to illuminate the things that caused me problems - so it covers:
*  templates [including embeds] *  weblogs & fields *  EE tags & variables *  categories
😊

Thanks for the condensed version what could be called ExpressionEngine CliffsNotes, it looks to contain a whole bunch of great practical examples on logic and code examples.
I’ld call it ExpressionEngine for Dummies, but there are no dummies aboard here. 😊