Matt,
The wiki can always use help, so thank you! I think your approach makes sense.
I will note that there already is a set of installation pages, and it may be
most useful simply to move the relevant questions and answers to them. I
suspect that there are similar overlaps in other areas of the FAQ. In each
case, I would hope that you would keep a general question in the FAQ along with
a reference to the appropriate dedicated wiki page. But by all means, move
content to more specific pages wherever possible!
One major challenge in all the GnuCash documentation (the wiki, the website,
and the Help and Guide) is making sure that the information is up to date,
accurate, and still relevant. While it may be interesting to refer to technical
accounting discussions from the lists in 2005, are the discussions still
useful, and should readers need to know about them? I would hope that as you
move things around, some of the more dated entries could be removed or placed
in a different context to reflect their time-dated nature.
Generally, I think that information that addresses problems for versions that
are no longer officially supported should either be deleted or archived in a
special GnuCash salt mine, so that current users of the software aren’t
worrying whether they need to manage their dbus daemons or not.
David
> On Feb 9, 2018, at 9:03 AM, Matt Graham <matt_graham2...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> G’day All,
>
> I was thinking about what Adrien said in a past email: “Many questions lately
> seem to be asked a bit too quickly.”. I agree – I sometimes wonder whether
> people do a simple google before asking.
>
> Still, when I tried to go onto the GNUCash FAQ wiki to find the answer and
> send it to someone, I found it really hard to find it (but it was there when
> I searched the page). Due to the huge amount of ‘questions’ on there, It is
> very difficult to quickly scan down to find stuff you are interested in.
>
> I have edited the page to take the actual questions out of the table of
> contents – so hopefully people can more easily find their answer through
> browsing their area (eg the “Using the Business Features” area if they are
> wondering about how to do invoice stuff). Devs/experts, feel free to revert
> it back if you don’t like it.
> I fiddled with “mw-collapsable” to get an expandable table of contents, but
> couldn’t get it working well.
>
> To further improve it all, I’m considering trying to establish more wiki
> pages to take a lot of the questions off the FAQ. Eg all the installation
> questions would probably be better placed on wiki pages, with the FAQ just
> having entries “Installing on Windows”, “Installing on Mac” and “Installing
> on Linux” to link users to the right wiki page
>
> Anyone got any other ideas to make it easier for people to find the answers
> without taking up Adrien/John/Geert/Mike’s time? (you all rock, by the way)
>
> Thanks and regards,
>
> Matt
>
> From: Adrien Monteleone<mailto:adrien.montele...@gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, 8 February 2018 6:29 AM
> To: gnucash-user@gnucash.org<mailto:gnucash-user@gnucash.org>
> Subject: Re: Cash Flow View
>
> I second Mike’s comments generally.
>
> What would probably address most concerns in this regard is a default
> multi-column report that included the basics—Income Statement, Balance Sheet,
> and perhaps Income/Expense graphs. This would be auto-opened and up to date.
> If a seasoned/power user didn’t want it, they could just set a preference not
> to open it at start. Alternatively, it could be a menu entry or toolbar
> button for easy discovery.
>
> Many questions lately seem to be asked a bit too quickly. But that’s not
> always the case. In my several years of experience as a Gnucash user, I find
> much of what I want to accomplish to be quite obtuse discovery-wise. Perhaps
> this is a consequence of the software being generalized for as many use cases
> as possible, but I’d suspect more because the reporting system has a very
> high hurdle for customization. (and the data is not yet easy to extract as
> with proper SQL, which is of course, in the works)
>
> The recurring questions I see on this list aren’t issues with Gnucash not
> being able to provide what people are looking for, but that the ability takes
> some gymnastics, or at the least is not easily discoverable. Certainly, that
> is something I think can be improved even before the full SQL implementation
> is achieved.
>
> With regards to the specific question, the answer is, “No, it doesn’t out of
> the box.”
>
> There IS a ‘cash flow’ report, but this isn’t the same sort of report that I
> was expecting to see or what is described on most business accounting sites