Phil Sullivan said the following on 28/05/2005 16:30:
What would have (and would be :-)) useful for me was clearer doc's
around the tabbing structure. I got it working through trial and
error. A real newbie might not be willing to do that.
I agree. After I started playing with the colors of the pelt skin, I
was intrigued by the way level-2-tabs (are supposed to) work and which
menu items get assigned to each tab. I checked both the 0.6 and the 0.7
doc on menus.
a) subtabs are not mentioned.
b) there is an explanation of an example site.xml and tabs.xml showing
what the result is, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions for
someone who wants a different result. Like, can you have multiple <faq
> elements as long as they have different labels, or should you call
them <faq1 >, <faq2 >, etc? Are you allowed to call them <faq1 >, <faq2
>, etc or are the tags in menus constrained by a DTD? Same question
for groupings of elements.
So I fully agree that how-to manage the navigation experience and how-to
go beyond modifying template content is needed.
I also had a hard time getting my head around where static html pages
should go ...(i.e an existing html page outputed from say word or open
office).
Finally i never was able to figure out how to use other skins (which
someone else brought up recently). This was not important to me...so i
went withthe default.
*someone else* here: tigris seems to work and I like its less colorful
look, but leather-dev seems to look like pelt but with the menu in the
middle of the page.
But even in *basic* skin use, for example, a project name longer than
"MyProject" can cause appearance problems, and there are not many clues
on what to do about it: we need an explanation of how-to adjust if your
project logo doesn't fit in the default settings (I sketched that in my
first post here and will rework it if necessary.) Oh, and it took me
longer than it should to find the how-to.xml template in the
distribution--I was only looking in the seeded project for useable
templates! Nobody told me...
If it would be useful I would be willing to help with the
documentation effort by reviewing it from the perspective of a person
with limited knowledge of css, xml, or forrest ....
Phil
Addi wrote:
** (from users, brought over to dev - replies will go to dev) **
Brought this over to dev to continue the discussion on exactly how to
proceed with beginner documetation. As David points out we should
figure out whether this is something that should be a separate
HowTo, incorporated into the main docs or something else.
Originally I was thinking of it as a HowTo and that we could take
some of the more important bits and add them to the main docs. But I
do think (actually hope) that the average user skills will decrease
as forrest spreads. Right now it feels very geeky and I have friends
who know something about html and css who may be interested in a
program like this but would't really be able to pull this off with
their current knowledge and, frankly, aren't going to take time to
figure it out. If we want to bring more folks like that into the
fold, then maybe moving more of the basic stuff into the main docs
would make more sense. WDYT?
I agree. The seeded site is a great demo, and a good start for the
curious. But what do you do after 'forrest run' and you've finished
playing with the demo? How do you kill jetty? Reboot? ;-) Seriously,
you shouldn't tell people how to start something and not how to finish it.
I think a collection of HowTo's makes sense, or call it an "Owner's
Manual", like you get with a new car--something that might eventually
become tutorials as well. And with links from them to the
*Documentation* documentation to "learn more".
To clarify a little what I mean by beginner, I am starting with as
few assumptions as I think reasonable. The perspective is someone
who uses html and css, probably using a GUI editor, has no command
line experience and can follow directions :). Most linux users have
some command line experience but from linux forums I can see lots of
new to linux users who don't really grasp it beyond the specific
thing they are told to type in an answer to their question. Most
windows users don't have any of it. I use it all the time on my
linux/unix boxes but forrest is the first time I had to figure any of
it out in windows (I now hate backslashes in a whole new way).
-Addi
I totally agree with your assessment of challenges many potential users
face. I have trouble imagining my father using Forrest, yet he has
built his own static website editing html templates with Notepad or
Word. Does everyone have a JRE installed? Is that requirement mentioned
somewhere?
Furthermore, I hate backslashes, too. I have written a bat file to ease
my most common move: "cd c:\documents and settings\all
users\documents\www\myproject". And thanks to Forrest, I finally
learned how to set environment variables in Win XP.
I'll be glad to participate (but don't know how to use svn).
Maurice
