Can we have a forum called "absolute beginners"?

By casperl on 10 Sep 2005 at 07:05 UTC

Hi,

"He who asks a question may appear to be a fool, he who does not ask will remain a fool forever"

There are many beginners with Drupal trolling the Drupal support forums, searching for answers and not finding them.

My experience with Drupal is that very often you only know how you should have phrased your questions in the first place, once you have found the answer to your question. There are a lot of concepts and terminology that are unfamiliar, even to people with a proficient background in computing.

From what I can foresee, the complexity of Drupal will continually increase. Drupal is not a small system and the whole Drupal system together with the available modules and themes encompasses a substantial code base with a wide range of functionality. The basic usage of most computer applications can be taught in a fraction of the time that it would take a web designer to have the expertise to set up an effective Drupal based website. (I am not talking about installation, that was the easy part.)

In all fairness to the newbies that simply don't know better and will ask the questions that have been asked over and over, simply because they don't know how to phrase their questions in 'Drupal-speak', can we have a support forum called "Absolute Beginners'?

This should be a place where 'stupid' questions may be asked. Those questions may be 'stupid' to the experienced Drupal people, but to us newbies they certainly might not appear to be stupid at all. It would of course be just as useful if answers given could be in the language of 'newbie-speak' instead of in 'techie-speak'. :)

In this way newbies will be able to find their feet much sooner in Drupal without increasing the 'irritation level' of the Drupal-savvy users.

After my first few questions and the inevitable response of 'search first before asking', despite the fact that I have been searching and searching, I am becoming wary of asking questions and of betraying my lack of understanding Drupal in those questions. To the newbie that have a requirement to make use of the functionality of a Drupal based website, while not having the relevant technical background it must be very scary.

Just to forestall the inevitable replies to this post: Yes I know Drupal does a fantastic job of hiding it's complexity, and in practice Drupal is incredibly easy to use and versatile - and I am thankfull for that. But undoubtedly it is very bewildering for newbies, and there is undeniably a curve where using Drupal becomes more confusing once you have the site up an running and you are experimenting with setting content in place and getting the website to look and operate the way you want to.

After seeing the power and flexibility present in Drupal, I would not be surprised to see the number Drupal installations increasing exponentially with a corresponding increase in 'newbie questions'.

Just a suggestion.

Comments

Ask your questions, everyone

sepeck commented 10 September 2005 at 07:38

Ask your questions, everyone was new once. We have gotten more and more new people, but we have started having more and more people sticking around and helping out the people that know less then them. I love it when I click through new forum posts and find many/most have been answered well by people whose nicks are not familier.

What many of us are trying to do is update the handbook and get more people to help contribute to the handbook. When I realized I was repeating answers I started the Configure your site section of the Best Practices and provide links to answers there (saw someone else provide a link to it earlier today too :)

If we segregate 'newbies' then we risk people never realizing when they should move to the other forums. If we mix them in this melting pot, you never know what inspiration will be generated. It's fun to watch people who consider themselves still newbies answer questions that three months earlier they would never have figured out.

Perhaps as you figure stuff out, you can write a series of configuration guides? Anyone can add a handbook page. SHow enough interest and we'll draft you into the docs team.

To be honest, I user /tracker most of the time, so I rarely realize what forum I am answering questions in anyway.

Dries reads the forums, so we'll see what happens.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Lets rephrase my problem

casperl commented 12 September 2005 at 09:20

Casper Labuschagne
*** Drupal Status : Rank Beginner ***

Hi,

I appreciate your reply.

The real problem is the arrogant / smug behaviour of experienced Drupal-savvy users with their 'SEARCH FIRST' standard response vs idiot beginners like myself.

A few minutes ago I again had a question, I searched on drupal.org and opened 12 different tabbed windows. None of them contained the answer to the question I had. As always deadlines are looming and I need the answers NOW!

But I'll be damned if I am going to post a question on the forums and get a <your question have been asked before - search first> reply. My present comfort zone would be amongst a forum for absolute fools, idiots and zombies right now.

In fact, I believe that the major learning curve with Drupal lies at the point where you have a site up with 20-100 stories with >8 pages and the structure of the taxonomy just is not right, nodes just does not appear where I would like etc. I know how to achieve the results I require in conventional static websites but I am totally powerless to steer Drupal to my idea of a website. Yet Drupal has the power and flexibility I need.

I wonder if my experience is unique? What did I miss?

A tip for searching - related to above comment

casperl commented 12 September 2005 at 09:38

Casper Labuschagne
*** Drupal Status : Rank Beginner ***

By the way, I get a better search using Google's advanced search options specifying words that must appear, exact phrase etc than through the standard Drupal search function (as in Drupal.org)

This comment is not intended to deride the Drupal search function, but if the standard Drupal search does not yield the answers, try an alternative!

Be sure to check the Drupal version number of the answers for websites other than drupal.org against the version of Drupal you have installed because as I discovered that may be the source of major confusion!

Search improvements in the works

robertdouglass commented 13 September 2005 at 14:47

It's no secret that Drupal's search sometimes underperforms compared to Google's. After all, that's why Google is famous :-)

The good news is that better search functions are on the way. I can't say exactly when they'll hit the codebase or Drupal.org, but they're being programmed by one of the core maintainers, so they'll get here eventually. Sometimes Drupal's search does do a better job than Google, so it is useful to have both available.

- Robert Douglass

-----
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intimidating

heather commented 12 September 2005 at 12:48

this is a notoriously difficult topic to address. comparing to my own experiences on other online communities, the drupal forum is fairly intimidating/prickly; sadly, it has kept me from participation. seems like many others have found the same thing.

i started keeping track of drupal+frustration... and ways that people have suggested managing that newbie frustration. it's a heated topic, and for good reason.

arg ;)

sepeck commented 12 September 2005 at 18:40

Several people have 'search and handbook' references in their signature line (sort of like mine). This isn't a slam or attack, but a 'we are not paid' please ask what you need, not what is easily available already. There are numerous posts where people mention the steps that they have taken looking for an answer and they often get detailed answers on how to find it in the future.

Next argument is "I don't know what to look for". Well, learn, and posting and searching is how you will do this. Flat out, some of the answers you will get are links to the handbook as it should be. Despite what some people say, out of over 30000 posts, there are quite frankly more posts complaining and gripping about RFTM then people actually saying TO RTFM.

You have one post from over a year ago. That was an interesting discussion too as the initial post was rude and designed really as a flame. :) One post said, 'I've read the instructions and it doesn't work'. Well, you need to be specific about what doesn't work or you will be ignored as 'It doesn't work' contains nothing to troubleshoot. Rightfully so, if you can't ask for help effectively you will have great difficulty getting it. You, as a member of the community, are perfectly welcome to try and draw this person out. Please do. Please participate in solving the problem. It is a more effective use of your time.

and this thread had a nice discussion. I don't see where people were slapped or punished here... It had a lot of information. Some has been integrated into the handbook. That's the point of this forum stuff.

I do not get the point of the WP to Drupal thread in your links. Migrating is specialized and requires people knowledgeable, able and willing to maintain and test this stuff. Once you've switched, why continue to use the old?

As to this thread here? HOW is this a frustration. The question was asked and I, one member of the community, posted what I thought was a reasonable response and now we are having a conversation. Where did I say rtm or such? I thought I explained why I thought segregating new users was a really bad idea. I want and continue to advocate for the melting pot approach. We are all people and we share an interest, Drupal.

The General forum is for this kind of stuff. The install problems is for install problems. We have a upgrade and 'how-do-I forum.

If you want to 'solve' this, then stick around and help out. Answer questions in the forums. You don;t have to know a lot, just more than the person asking. Beat me, or Drupal_Dublineer, or aho, killes, Steven or chx to the answer. If you answer it your way, then we won't have to answer it and can spend more time on improving other things.

Show people HOW to find the information in the handbook by providing a link to your favorite section in your signature. Hang out in #drupal-support. Many of the people go there and flat out say that they haven't looked in the handbook.

I started the 'Configure your site' section in the Best Practices. I realized that I was answering question more than I should. So, I added a handbook page and started providing friendly links to them. And yes, they were friendly links. I came across a post recently where someone I didn't recognized answered a question with a link to my handbook page. That was great. It meant I answered the question while I was asleep.

As to unanswered questions? Well, you can help solve that. We have maybe 30 really active people at any given time (I am probably high here too) and 6 months ago we had less that hit the forums over a month answering questions. Questions scroll off the board, get missed, aren't asked well. Some are asked in the forums, then get answered in #drupal-support and the requester never updates their post. Others, no one knows the answer. You want them answered? Then answer them. Please answer them.

If you look at my history, I have been advocating that people, particularly the newer ones and the mid level site admins, stick around and answer forum posts. And people have been. People just like you. All you have to do, is answer questions you know the answer to. You can even sometimes offer possible approaches to people when you don't know the answer by linking to handbook pages that may get someone close.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

can i delete my post please?

heather commented 12 September 2005 at 20:52

to be plain, i wished instantly that i had not piped in this thread. oh how i wish we could delete our own posts on drupal.

please assume good faith. i was just trying commiserate and to gently point out that this had been spoken of before in different ways, and it was well-trod ground. it seems a terrible waste that my response to this person's suggestion had wasted your time. you appear to have put in alot of thought into your response.

very sorry, honestly.

thank you for your contributions.

Good thread

webwright commented 12 September 2005 at 21:21

I think a beginners forum is a good idea. Newbies can ask for help and help each other.

I think there ARE a lotta folks who tend to be a little snippy when newbie questions are asked. I, for one, am happy to answer beginner questions (as it's about the only kind I CAN answer!).

There are several issues which keep the "search before you ask" response:

1) Drupal Search is weak IMHO. I don't wanna hack on any programmers, but my ability to find stuff searching on Drupal is fairly low (and I consider myself a pretty smart guy. With no advanced search capabilities, no ability to say "I want to search ONLY forums", "I want to search ONLY Jan 2005 or later)... Well, I really think it'd be more valuable to change the search form to search via Google (i.e. site:drupal.org in Google). In fact, that's how I usually search Drupal.

2) Drupal.org, until recently, was glacially slow. Doing 5 of 6 searches in a row took FOREVER. Kudos to the community (and the leaders) for fixing this, but I bet it trained a lot of people to ignore the search box. ;-)

3) Vocabulary - Sometimes you just don't know the right words to search.

One of the biggest issues that I think Drupal has is that it has a rough learning curve for some and the community (like ALL online communities) is full of people who are long on smarts but sometimes short on social niceties.

Heck, I'd volunteer to Mod an "absolute beginners forum", and I'd lobby strong for a search interface that ONLY searches that.

In fact, give me a beginners.drupal.org instance of Drupal and I'll make it freakin' shine. ;-)

___________________________________
Tony Wright
Travel Guides (Drupal Site)
Google Adsense Keywords

Drupal standard forum module

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 01:58

The reason Drupal forums are particularly weak (technically speaking) is in my opinion that they are far from fully developed and have gotten less attention than some other CMSes.

The main culprit is that there is a simplified storage structure where "comments" are more or less flatly used as in most blog-type sites. This makes the performance of browsing Drupal forums (comment-lists really) acceptable. If each post/comment was a full-blown node, another fallacy would be apparent. The caching system is not designed for the performance requirements of large forums based on nodes. Nodes load with a sometimes large sets of hooks. These hooks are sometimes plainly called for any node, without any pruning techniques in which modules should be called. This could be remedied with something like the Event-Listener (or MVC) type of software patterns.

Thus, searching is also not perfect, because there are many times where the same structure you'd expect to support and order the results is not present in the basic underlying forum design.

The blog-like fact that you can't edit your comment posting (and even worse your forum node posting) as well further complicates the use, perhaps especially on drupal.org. sepeck noted that people should return and update information, but unfortunately siteadmins are the only ones allowed to edit their forum node posts. Comments are editable until someone responds to it. That obviously makes participating and updating discussions a little more daunting, but seems more a political design decision.

Most forum systems depend heavily on caching and duplicated information to get acceptable performance. I am confident however that the Drupal forum system will improve in the time ahead, as it is sorely needed.

Your knowlege of the inner workings is wrong

robertdouglass commented 13 September 2005 at 15:23

Part of helping people find information is identifying misinformation and your technical analysis in this post is simply wrong.

If each post/comment was a full-blown node, another fallacy would be apparent. The caching system is not designed for the performance requirements of large forums based on nodes.

First of all, the caching system works on a page level, not a node or comment level, and it therefore doesn't matter one bit whether you write comments or nodes. Comments also have their own hooks the same way that nodes do.

Second, every programmer on earth knows that MVC will save the world, just look at Struts. Really -- when you say MVC, you should at least explain what you mean and take the time to offer a suggestion about how to separate Drupal into a Model a View and a Controller. Let's see, how would one do it; I know! We save the data in the database and let the underlying SQL relational structure be the model (node, comment, vocabulary, term, user). Then, we have a single point of entry that decides what models to load and what to do with them (index.php, bootstrap.php, menu system, node API). Finally, we send the models that have been processed by the controller to the view (theme system). Since it is such a good idea, I think Drupal should do it too.

Next up, Event-Listener. Well, let's say we had an event, such as a node being created. To implement your Event-Listener pattern, we'd need to have a way to broadcast that event to all listening parties. Perhaps we could call this function hook_nodeapi?

Yes, I'm being sarcastic with you eldarin. You have a very subtle way of complaining, so I feel that you earned it.

Final piece of misinformation; in fact, searching for text in nodes and comments works the same way. The underlying structure doesn't discriminate between text in nodes and text in comments. Therefore your argument about node vs. comment structure simply doesn't apply to searching, as you imply.

For those who are interested, here is the relevant code that shows the weights that different texts get in search results:

'h1' => 21,
'h2' => 18,
'h3' => 15,
'h4' => 12,
'h5' => 9,
'h6' => 6,
'u' => 5,
'b' => 5,
'strong' => 5,
'em' => 5,
'a' => 10);

What that means is that this instance of MVC Pattern in Drupal will get more weight than if I just write "MVC Pattern in Drupal" because of the <em> tags I used to make it appear italicized. The search results also take into consideration whether there are internal links pointing to a particular page. If so, that page gets more weight in the results returned, as people seemed to have found it interesting enough to link to.

- Robert Douglass

-----
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Knowledge of inner workings and recollection

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 16:01

Nodes not individually cached at all, really ?

function node_load($conditions, $revision = NULL, $reset = NULL) {
  static $nodes = array();

  if ($reset) {
    $nodes = array();
  }

  $cachable = (count($conditions) == 1 && isset($conditions['nid']) && $revision == NULL);

 if ($cachable && isset($nodes[$conditions['nid']])) {
    return $nodes[$conditions['nid']];
 }

I guess that code from the node.module is only in my imagination ...
;-)

The thing about the nodeapi currently is that it calls up each and every module to check for changes. An event-listener model would mean that only the relevant modules would be called up for the relevant event.

What I meant by "the same structure you'd expect to support and order the results" was in reference to (advanced) search in other forums, whereby you currently do not see such search features in the basic Drupal installation. The search function is simplified from the user interface point of views.

The current Drupal cache is flushed for every small change and would not at all be very efficient for a large forum based on nodes (which would be worse than the simplified blog-like comment system as it stand today).
If you use the source, Luke, you will see remarks on how comments are separated from nodes for performance issues. Mainly because of possible large table scans, if I remember - and large joins.

The pageranking feature is nice, but should probably be somthing the user could control, instead of politically being decided by the developer. Just like the comment and node editing cut-off when replies to the comment or node is made.

There is a lot of room for improvement of the forum module specifically. The constant requests of integration of phpBB or similar is proof of that. And I don't know anyone who would claim Drupal basic forums as superior when looking for traditional forum functionality.
;-p

static vs cache table

robertdouglass commented 13 September 2005 at 15:57

I meant the cache table in the db. The word cache is overloaded - many meanings, so I should have been more clear. By the way, the statically cached nodes in your code example include the comments that they have; in other words, the comments are seen as part of the node, and the code you point out above means that any given node only gets loaded once so that no redundant work is done. So, in fact, the caching that you indicate applies equally to nodes and comments.

- Robert Douglass

-----
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Who knows ... and who doesn't know!

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 16:29

function node_show($node, $cid) {
  $output = node_view($node, FALSE, TRUE);

  if (function_exists('comment_render') && $node->comment) {
    $output .= comment_render($node, $cid); // *** this one will render the comment listing, Luke ***
  }

  // Update the history table, stating that this user viewed this node.
  node_tag_new($node->nid);

  return $output;
}

function comment_render($node, $cid = 0) {
  global $user;

  $mode = $_G ET['mode'];
  $order = $_GE T['order'];
  $threshold = $_G ET['threshold'];
  $comments_per_page = $_G ET['comments_per_page'];
  $comment_page = $_G ET['comment_page'];

  $output = '';
...
    $output .= "<a id=\"comment\"></a>\n";

    if ($cid) {
      // Single comment view.

      $output .= '<fo rm method="p ost" action="'. url('comment') ."\"><div>\n";
      $output .= form_hidden('nid', $nid);

      // *** Lookie here, Luke! We get the the whole freaking node listing for the page from a SELECT and a JOIN none the less !!! ***
      $result = d b_query('SE LECT c.cid, c.pid, c.nid, c.subject, c.comment, c.format, c.timestamp, c.name, c.mail, c.homepage, u.uid, u.name AS registered_name, u.picture, u.data, c.score, c.users FROM {comments} c INNER JOIN {users} u ON c.uid = u.uid WHERE c.cid = %d AND c.status = 0 GROUP BY c.cid, c.pid, c.nid, c.subject, c.comment, c.timestamp, c.name, c.mail, u.picture, c.homepage, u.uid, u.name, u.picture, u.data, c.score, c.users', $cid);

      if ($comment = db_fetch_object($result)) {
        $comment->name = $comment->uid ? $comment->registered_name : $comment->name;
        $output .= theme('comment_view', $comment, theme('links', module_invoke_all('link', 'comment', $comment, 1)));
      }
...

So, who's wrong ?
;-P

PS! I should probably have told you that I have already coded an alternative forum module as part of a Drupal-based CRM system I am working on. .. but you would have known that if you had looked at some of the earlier postings I have made here on drupal.org. So, I have some pretty quickly recollectable knowledge of the current forum functionality, and that was what my comment was about - current Drupal forum design shortcomings. There are many, many more shortcomings to the Drupal forums when looking at other mainstream forum systems by the way.
;-)

The caching of the pages is pretty whimpy when it comes to getting good performance out of the forums, becuase the pages need to be updated pretty often. My forum system address this issue.

Now, here's some sarcasm back at 'ya: I hope you do some good reference and citation checking on that book of yours ... because the way it's looking it's not exactly looking like it's going to be the "authorative reference".

As you can see I try and keep my postings current and as error free as possible, although I'm not exactly perfect there - I'll be the first to admit so. But I try my best and with my best intentions.
;-)

Actually...

robertdouglass commented 13 September 2005 at 16:40

You're right. That query comes after the node has been statically cached (though it still makes it into the page cache). Furthermore, even on my local machine which should be really really fast, it still registers as a slow query on a test site with one node and three comments:

9.05 1 SELECT c.cid as cid, c.pid, c.nid, c.subject, c.comment, c.format, c.timestamp, c.name , c.mail, c.homepage, u.uid, u.name AS registered_name, u.picture, u.data, c.score, c.users, c.thread FROM comments c INNER JOIN users u ON c.uid = u.uid WHERE c.nid = 69 AND c.status = 0 GROUP BY c.cid, c.pid, c.nid, c.subject, c.comment, c.format, c.timestamp, c.name, c.mail, u.picture, c.homepage, u.uid, u.name, u.picture, u.data, c.score, c.users, c.thread ORDER BY c.thread DESC LIMIT 0, 50

If you have a better forum system on the way, I'll be very happy, because it is a common complaint that they are not as full-featured as dedicated forum systems.

Now, about attacking me because I don't know something, or about judging my book before you've seen it; that isn't nice. Enough said.

(the book isn't a programming reference, by the way. It doesn't venture to teach people how to program Drupal, or provide an "authorative reference" for programmers. I'll let you write that one.)

- Robert Douglass

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Sarcasms again ...

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 17:06

Robert, you should know better than to continue with throwing sarcasms around. You could just get clobbered again.

I think you deserved the one about the upcoming bestseller - outperforming J.K. Rowling no doubt. It is your most vulnerable spot, but you still come back for more and don't stop yourself.

If you re-read my post explaining human nature and how "clobbering" occurs, you'll understand you yourself need to stop trying to attack. If you were right somewhere you would at least have a fighting chance, but like you have been going on, you have been a pushover. Perceived community clout doesn't matter in every cirumstance.
;-)

I am thinking about how my forum module and the whole set of modules which accompanies it can be released back. It's not an easy task, because som much extra functionality has been added to make the forums extra powerful and flexible. Like I said elsewhere, my forum module support private groups, flexible moderation roles and intelligent auto-tagging of posts etc. That involves not only a single module but quite a few actually.

So, if you stop the sarcasms you won't get any back. It's really simple and up to you. I will not be the first one to take them up again for arguments sake only.
;-)

When admitting error...

robertdouglass commented 13 September 2005 at 17:18

For the record, the part of my above statement that eldarin proved wrong is this:

the statically cached nodes in your code example include the comments that they have

Lest his liberal postings of code work to cast doubt on the rest of what I said.

- Robert Douglass

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Appreciate that,

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 17:29

and no hard feelings on my part.

I still hope developers housing at drupal.org will change some attitudes - but somehow I think this tirade of responses (not the first time, mind you) might do so.

I haven't earned my black belt for nothing, although I constantly hurt myself jumping around on the keyboard like this.
;-D

Event-Listener revisit

robertdouglass commented 13 September 2005 at 16:04

I think you and I discussed the Event-Listener idea on another thread. At the moment, the nodeapi function "listens" to events and gets to decide at execution time whether or not to respond to it. In order to implement things your way, we'd have to reverse the roles a bit; the modules would have to do something to register their interest in the events, meaning they would have the task of knowing in advance which events they want to respond to. The overhead of that approach would almost certainly be an added database query that asked for a list of "interested" modules for any given event. The current system lets the nodeapi function simply return quickly with no processing if it isn't interested in the event. In other words, we're looking at extra database queries in one case and empty functions in the other. Both require overhead and time (unavoidable), and I'm guessing that the current system would outperform one where database qeuries were needed to get lists of modules interested in events.

If you have a better implementation plan, I'd be happy to look at it. Everyone wants Drupal to be as fast as possible, and that is a goal that most developers are willing to spend time on.

- Robert Douglass

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That's the whole point, Luke ...

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 16:35

Reversing the roles and not firing off events blindly was the whole point if you could recollect. It was part of a system to selectively load needed modules instead of needing to include every module for every page creation. It was part of a larger core performance improving issue. There was an issue on this which I followed up on with some of my ideas.
%-D

It's not only about getting Drupal as fast as possible, it's also about reducing the memory-footprint which can get pretty wild some times. E.g the modules admin page as reported elsewhere.

Now, I hope it's not you who will complain about getting completely off topic in this thread this time. Anxiously looking forward to hear from you again, if you really would like to continue this ridiculous behaviour. Go ahead, look at all my forum postings and we can discuss to all your hearts concert.
;-p

I still think we should look at the improvement of drupal.org as mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

drupal.org slow

sepeck commented 13 September 2005 at 07:30

Drupal.org was slow because the server until a week ago was running on one server. Two of the new servers went live and things really perked up. (One backend DB on a Sun box, the other a frnt end web server). Two more are going live soon and then cvs and mail will be migrated. There are some announcements that may have scrolled off the front page about it. When it all gets done, there will be a larger announcement with details.

As to a beginners forums, well keep on the discussion. We'll see. Convince me and that's one more voice. (note: I will not be on the web much this week due to work hours at this point) I will catch up next week though.

In the mean time, answer what questions you can. Change on drupal.org takes a lot of discussion and then suddenly, it's done. Part of the issue is the work on the new infrastructure is sucking away some time right now.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

nope :)

sepeck commented 13 September 2005 at 07:23

You expressed a frustration. That's fine. It's obviously a frustration. Please do not take it as a criticism, I want to explain my position and understand yours. Do not be embarrassed by yours. Through conversation and dialog we gain a middle ground or at least understanding.

My position is no less valid then yours and your position is no less valid than mine. I am not trying to 'quiet' you. I want to know why section labeled new comers would be better then the melting pot approach we currently have? I am trying to explain the logic of the melting pot approach over 'segregating' newbies. I am one voice among many and your voice may be the one that carries the weight in the community.

I try to advocate to people to get involved, to help others, to help shape this site's path forward. Without this input and involvement we don't. If we decide to keep the melting pot, then we understand why, if we create a 'newbies' forum, then we agree that someone will need to take responsibility to help out there.

You did not waste my time. I would not have spent it if I did not think I could learn from you. This conversation is not a waste of time for me. I am trying to help people understand how things are working and understand why people want to change it.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

RTFM and variants

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 03:03

RTFM actually is meant to be both a stinging reply and disguised as a helpful retort. "Search first" is just a variant of this as it applies to websites, and not the comp.lang.* USENET groups or similar back in time.

Trying to uphold it as anything else is a sorry excuse.

Being polite and showing good social behavior is not always easy when feeling stressed out or having other emotional problems. Unfortunately, many do not know themselves - they don't show great EQ, empathy or have poorly developed people skills.

A great way to find out about yourself might be looking at a fun start like the Keirsey Temperament tester. I took it myself sometime in 1992 and then made a lot of friends test it too. Later I took the test several times through the years to see if it changed. Back then it was a result of alt.psychology discussions and the book "Please understand me" which resulted in a CGI script hosted by someone with sunsite.unc.edu .

Some might be well versed in Drupal, but less so in Internet or other social behavior. Anyways, people reading forums also need to understand that they can rarely demand anything from anyone - developer, creator or other.

Visitors need to show some respect and understanding that they are new, while the experienced can also show their maturity by having thicker skin than average. A flameproof asbestos vest is always handy, just in case.

By the way ENxJ was my consistent test results.
;-)

edit: just a sidenote...
Having clout really means pathetically little.
Take the example of a martial artist. He might have the best flying kicks and beautiful technique than any of his friends have seen. Snapping straight-line side kicks which just seem to flow with natural ease, but still forcefully. In sparring he accurately pinpoints his target strikes and seems unbeatable. Everyone in his club and surroundings are in awe. He has clout like noone else and is an icon amon his peers.

Then comes a new kid to the club. Has some experience from before and other clubs. The natural instincts of everyone in the club is to see if the newcomer is any good. This intimidates the newcomer which might become reclusive, or just go away. The club icon which is prop-full of clout and authority sets out to test the newcomer, like any silverback in the wild. It's very inate to human nature too.

The newcomer completely flattens the clout-propped silverback. The club veteran rises, and gets clobbered again - time and time over. Suddenly the club community is in shambles, the illusions have all been shattered. The clout is gone and the silverback seems broken down to ferrous junk.

That's what happens when all you have is community clout, and nothing else. Anyone can come in and kick your puny ass.

Depending on community merit alone is not what it takes, it's most often an illusion to it's members. Having the real experience, wisdom and practical sense beats the clout every time.

Like I say sometimes, it helps to be right when debating, because then you at least have a fighting chance. ;-)
I mentioned this example because it very accurately depicts how we all behave and what sometimes makes us tick in a particular way, and I have more than 11 years of practizing martial arts and as an instructor.

So, don't let clout of any kind cloud your eyes, it's most certainly an illusion. Remember that when being a newbie or seeing other newbies; they can veritably clobber you any time if they chose to.
;-)

Humor

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 03:19

If anyone reading this lacks the amount of self-humor required, take a twio dolgi dwit yop chagi dip in the nearest lake. It's good to cool off before responding.

An emotional explosion makes anyone look really bad no matter what. Textual media has so many interpretations; just like any novel paints an imaginative world in your head. They might all be totally different than the author imagined however.

Well, I'm going almost zen here, so it's a pause for the stories tonight.
;-)

Drupal Forum

M.J commented 7 March 2006 at 22:35

I just came across this thread after submitting one with the same experience/problems I am facing with Drupal:

http://drupal.org/node/52914

I agree with the comments of the OP and others on this thread.

There does need to be a forum for complete newbies as the other forums seem to be quite daunting to post on for fear of asking a question that may be too basic for most web designers.

Drupal and Newbies

bobby-1 commented 12 September 2005 at 22:29

Strange how I was pondering basically the same thing myself the other day. The problem I face and suspect I am not alone, is the necessary knowledge of maintaining a site like Drupal only comes with time and experience. Unfortunately many of us see lots of possibilities with Drupal, want to use it and simply haven't a clue how to do the most basic programming required. I look at the log file and get glassy-eyed.

I try to spend at least every other day on recent topics in the forums to improve myself. I used to spend 1 hour a day min. learning html, no time now. As with the "pros"- work, family, etc., there is simply not enough time to do everything one needs to do. Answering questions for people like me is time consuming. I am still trying to figure out problems I have from over a month ago through trail and error and forum searching. I simply know too little and do not know where to find the appropriate information to help myself, help myself.

I think that if constructed properly, a beginners forum would be a good idea. But build it with links to appropriate tutorials regarding basic skills one need to have in using databases, command line prompts, shell access, Apache logs, etc. That way at least those of us who wish to improve our selves can refer to the basics and eliminate some of the more obvious questions. I know you can search the net and find "tons" of tutorials, most are not worth the page they are hosted on, others are so far advanced that they are not suitable for quick basic instruction.

I thought about offering a download of XAMPP with Drupal pre-installed on my site for beginners- it has helped me a lot, but I do not have the experience to support it. But that would be a great tool to have for beginners. I can not say how many times I have crashed my site from a moment of stupidity before XAMPP.

Just my 2 cents. I do not see the community as hostile to newcomers, but pressed for time over something that is free. Some people will take advantage of anything free. But others have a genuine interest, just lost in gaining the needed knowledge/skill level. Drupal's greatest asset of flexiblilty is also it's greatest downfall. Simple to a point of complexity.

If you do put in a new forum, would love to help in any small way I could.

write

sepeck commented 13 September 2005 at 07:46

Write the tutorials. We will find a place for them in the handbooks. These are best written while you are lernign the stuff. You see things some of us don't.

Anyone can post a handbook page. It goes into the moderation queue for the docs team. To help make sure we don't miss it, join drupal-docs mail list and mention that you did this and one of us will go look at it. Keep on contributing and we'll just draft you.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Beginner ... what?

laura s commented 12 September 2005 at 22:55

There are forums for installation problems, post-install problems, "how do I..." questions, etc. It seems to me, as someone was very green here not even a year ago, that it makes sense to divide forums by general topic area, rather than self-evaluated expertise level.

Speaking for myself, I never come here seeking out n00b questions to answer, but I answer them when I see them and have something to offer. Ghettoizing those questions may result in less help happening ... at least from me, maybe others.

I think some of the tone you detect comes from the fact that these forums probably have a higher percentage of computer-geeks/developers -- who are notoriously prickly in forums. (Hey, nothing personal, guys.)

Part of it also I think comes from the fact that several here do not speak or write English as a first language. Language barriers and cultural backgrounds can make for miscommunication.

I think you're right about search here. I use the trip-search module on nearly all of our installations because of its greater power and flexibility, but that doesn't help here. Googling the site is a great idea. I'm not sure if they're running the gsitemap module here, but Google seems to have a pretty good handle on what's posted here.

Finally, this really is a volunteer site for some fabulous software that nobody is getting paid to develop (with rare exceptions for contributed modules). Some people may be prickly, but others may be more forthcoming. And quite often the prickly response will also contain the answer you need.

Anyway, try not to take it personally.

Laura
===
pingVision • scattered sunshine

_____ ____ ___ __ _ _
Laura Scott :: design » blog » tweet

Nagging questions.

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 00:54

Just a little anecdote:
In 1993 a friend of mine asked when XFree86 support for his Brooktree Bt8-something S3-based videocard would be finished.

The seemingly innocent question resulted in an explosion from the lead XFree86 programmer who was sick and tired of all the nags about for all videocards and pressure to support them with all their quirks. He ended his response with saying that he was ready to quit developing for XFree86.

Needless to say, my friend got really terrified that his "nagging post" would halt such an important project. He then wrote a response where he made a typo and instead of saying he had no intention to make the developer feel that way, the opposite meaning appeared in the text. English was not his mother tongue as well, mind you.

A week later we were all laughing about the misunderstanding, and how it got all out of proportion. I think I saw the developer's name on the list of active developers still last year, so the whole incident just passed somewhat silently after some heads were cooled off.

What this goes to show is what many have experienced with the Internet: writing messages, especially in the easily informal electronic way, is an imperfect human communication medium. That's why we use "smilies" and other helpful "emoticons" etc. to hint about our meaning. Face-to-face communication always involves mimic and other physical expressions.

It is so easy to read something bad into what someone writes on discussion boards. USENET savvys might be very good at wearing so-called "asbestos-flame-proof suits" meaning they can withstand flamebaits and flaming attempts.

Many "newbies" - users and developers alike - are not always in a balanced peace of mind. Drupal developers and drupal.org lurkers are no different. We're all humans, and as water passes under the bridge we get wiser and calmer - albeit more grey-haired sometimes. Age and raging hormons are also part of discussions where it's evident that some are more hotly headed than others.

I think that the idea of a newbie flame-free zone is a good idea. Not because it just helps answer basic questions anyone new to Drupal might have, but also because it's a kind of friendly welcome - like any guest in your house might be greeted with. You look through the fingers on some of the differences the guest might show. That is part of being polite, it's part of accepted and expected social behavior.

There will always be sociopaths among users and developers. Having them avoid the button-triggering areas is a good way to avoid needless aggrevation on the part of any reader.

A newbie area is therefore a nice gesture to welcome anyone to the Drupal community. Ignore anyone saying something else, because they won't be on their best teenage behaviour all the time.
;-)

BTW, notice the fallacy of the standard Drupal forums lacking any form of emoticons, thereby lacking the means to express anything else than dry text which easily gets interpreted and processed by a responder's mind and outputs a reflection of their particular state of mind and mood at the time.

Well said

patrickharris commented 13 September 2005 at 02:04

Interesting points you make, and of course very true! A forum in many ways is a very limited form of communication - think of all the discussion forums on the internet you know of that always degenerate into violent bickering and one-upmanship, that would never happen in face-to-face conversation.

Also, to expect a newbie to not ask questions that have been asked before in a forum, is tantamount to expecting a person not to ask a question that has been asked before in history (after all, the answer could be read the literature ... Plato answers this).

However, I'm not convinced a newbie section is the answer - as Laura said, if people allocate themselves to some self-evaluated expertise level, it does ghettoize things.

Headers Are The Ticket

katie1n commented 13 September 2005 at 04:16

Announcement: I LOVE reading these Forums.

Yeah, I know - it's an eye blinking statement. One that probably begs an immediate global response: Get a life! But it's also the absolute truth at this point in my life. I am ridiculously new at Drupal – I have NO background in computers per se, although I thought I was pretty savvy until I started reading these forums. Well, that was an eye opener on a different scale, and certainly not pertinent to this leading post.

Frankly, I’m happy to admit that I wouldn’t know php from a packet of M’M’s. (You can eat php, can’t you?) I don’t know anything about servers, MySQL or FTP or basic install unless it’s point and click. In my defense, I’d be happy to wager my precious Maltese pup Bella on the fact that the Drupal programmers here wouldn’t have a blessed clue or basic knowledge on S8 drugs. Do they know what type Morphine is? Do they know the contraindications and adverse effects of this potentially deadly drug? Do they know how to provide life saving maneuvers in the event that everything goes pear shaped because, God forbid, someone forgot to mention they were allergic to the drug?

Should I expect these men and women to know everything, right now, given that they’re not from my world? No. Of course not. They’re programmers, IT consultants, or what other name you guys like to call yourselves. Gurus, probably, and that’s pretty cool. Unless they’re about to embark onto a side-line profession in Medicine/Health, then what good is this knowledge to them?

The way I see it, forums are platforms that allow any and all statements to be aired in an environment that has no rules. And that is the core problem to this post. POSTNOTE: Maybe that isn’t quite truthful. Perhaps my statement should be “… an environment that has no benchmark…” Please read my recent post What Are The Best Parts Of A Drupal Community for a better explanation.

But onward we go…

Here’s a more basic explanation of what I’ve seen to date.

If I gave everyone a 300 page book without specific titles (eg: NO Chapter 1, Chapter 2) and I told you to read it cover to cover, naturally, because you think I’m God’s right hand woman, you drop everything and start reading. And, saint’s be praised, you read every single page, every single word without stopping. Much like now :)

Come morning, when you’re perky and invigorated from reading my incredible new book, we gather around to discuss the essentials and it is there that I casually mention a new health virus that has hit the streets, killing thousands of people even as I speak (please, this is only a scenario – NOT The War of the Worlds!) What’s worse, we have exactly one minute to live.

Luckily, your salvation is close at hand. It’s in my new book under Chapter 4. All you have to do is find a particular phrase and bingo – your next breath here on Earth is assured. Mayhem, of course, ensues. Everyone dives for their book – see, I told you I’m God’s right hand woman – and start flicking the pages rapidly, but no one can find Chapter 4 or even that particular phrase. One smart individual starts from the front, but smart won’t beat time. 60 seconds isn’t an awful lot of seconds, and the clock is running out. As the author of this great book I’m compelled to offer free advice – I mean, how hard is it to find Chapter 4? I know where it is because I wrote the damn thing. Needless to say, I won’t tell you what happens to those smart individuals – your imagination will do that for me.

My Answer…
What if I gave you a book that had sectional titles (eg: Chapter 1, Chapter 2) I’d imagine that you’d find that particular phrase within the allotted time frame and have seconds to spare to rip into me for being so blasé and conceited about it all. Your life, apparently, means a lot more to you than it does to me.

Forums are perfect as they stand: General Forum. Installation Forum. How To forum. But Posting is a nightmare! When someone (generalizing here, folks) posts to these specific forums (ie: How To’) they generally use ridiculous header titles hoping, I’d imagine, to capture some Guru’s attention above and beyond some other yokel’s equally desperate needs.

Help! I killed my computer!

Like, how helpful is that? What insightful piece of information does that Post offer? When I browse the How To Forums trying to find a answer to specific question, I have to open each and every post because more often than not all I see are ridiculous header titles like Fred’s there, which basically means I have to open them all just in case my answer is lurking there, under: Help! I killed my computer.

Perhaps if the moderators or mediators, or Guru’s (that does sound way too cool) laid down strict guidelines for ALL newbies posts, then maybe, just maybe, this potential broiling pot will remain forever on slow simmer.

Ask yourself this: if you browsed the How To forum and saw ALL posts with headers similar to this:

Settings: How do I
Blocks: How do I
Users: How do I
Themes: How do I…..

Wouldn’t it facilitate search and find? I know that it would make my life damn uncomplicated. At a glance I can skim each and every header title, searching for posts that are EXCLUSIVELY adjoined to my problem. I can disregard all others without fear of thinking my answer is there because, hey, it won’t be. Then I save myself HOURS of search time that could be better spent playing with Drupal rather than reading about Drupal.

Just my three cents worth and Bella’s yap of approval.

Kate
That's STAT! NOT Start

moderated forums

eldarin commented 13 September 2005 at 05:58

Fully moderated forums demand a lot of time and effort.
http://www.webmasterworld.com is such a place. You will find well-written, usability complying posts all over the site. They are also a commercial site, with ad revenues, and - I guess - paid moderators.

I think there is no way you are going to get the same quality off of drupal.org forums. The best hope would be for some automated feature, like pathauto - only better. Unfortunately it is a computationally advanced and complex area of computer science which requires a lot of linguistical background. It's akin to NLP - Natural Language Processing.

The best compromise could be for someone to gather a form of digest, or best-of-site threads and index these. That would require efforts similar to normal forum moderation.

Do you think that could be a great idea ?
Then it only is a matter of convincing drupal.org maintainers, or perhaps indexing it yourself as some kind of meta-information. Of course then you start delving into the area of SEO and page-rank hijacking ...

You could potentially make a site driven by banner revenues offering digests of Drupal essential-read threads.

Drupa-planet has just been launched, so maybe there can be some improvements. It will certainly become controversial if newcomers find another forum which better serves their purpose or well-being.
;-)

maybe.

sepeck commented 13 September 2005 at 07:49

If we continue to get more people that stick around and help, then maybe we can build something. Boris Mann mentioned s a similer idea recently. The main issue is resources. The forum module would need some attention, but that attention would need some serious definition before random work was done about the goal. The next is people resources. Until recently, we flat out did not have enough people returning to answer questions in the forums. Maybe in the nesxt few months, we will get there.

-sp
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Lets Just Start Thinking Laterally

katie1n commented 13 September 2005 at 09:57

Just in case there was some confusion which, by the look of things there was, I’d like to offer more clarity on the subject.

We all have the same (or near enough) administration menu in our websites.

admin
create content

blog entry

book page

book review

forum topic

page

poll

story

my account
recent posts
submission queue
news aggregator
administer
log out

I won’t mention the other submenus, but everyone gets the drift. My initial suggestion was based solely on this menu. Naturally, when people post questions its because they’re having some problem that’s associated with a specific activity.

The usual posts I’ve seen range greatly, but here’s one example “How do I insert content onto a page?”

What I’d like to see in ALL posts that directly relate to How To Forum is an unconditional Category/Label typed inside the header component by users – before they write their own question.

Example:
(new style post question submitted to a How To forum)

Creating Content: Pages: How do I insert a image in the center of my page?

Administer: Blocks: How do I get a block to appear in the left column?

Administer: Themes: My themes won't show (I know! I know, this one could reasonably be placed into the Themes forum, but you get my drift, right?)

Whether or not you wish to omit the standard "How Do I?" (which would naturally follow the category specific heading) from the title is up for debate. Personally I think it's a waste of valuable typing space. We all know that we're seeking How Do I? answers, otherwise we wouldn't be submitting our posts into the How To forum.

My suggestion would be:

Creating Content: Pages: Insert an image

This title tells us three IMPORTANT things. 1) your problem relates directly to Creating Content. 2) Specifically with Pages and; 3) Inserting an Image.

In the body section of your post you can then elaborate in greater detail exactly what your problem is.

Adopting this style of clarification will significantly increse the amount of room in the title space for other important information like "greater clarification" to the problem at hand.

Can you see how useful this will be if everyone adopts this style of specific category headings FOR a SPECIFIC forum? It is my understanding that the whole purpose to How To forum was to guide and help all new users of Drupal activate, administer and ultimately Use Drupal for whatever purpose they have seen fit to use it.

But if we don't adopt some sort of organised hierarchical system that facilitates ease of search and find, then I have to wonder what, exactly, are we doing? Because we sure aren't administering our website nor are we getting our website up and running within a reasonable, if not acceptable, time frame.

And the total costs involved in implementing this style of organizational structure within How To Forum?

Zilch.

Time spent searching a billion files trying to source specific answers that relate to a specific activity would be considerably less than what we’re undertaking now.

Your thoughts?

FOOTNOTE: This is just a suggestion not a hard and fast rule. And because it was a suggestion, I sincerely hope people review the words in the same manner in which it was submitted. Friendly like:)

Kate
That's STAT! NOT Start

right. it's about learning to post in forums

cel4145 commented 13 September 2005 at 15:37

This is a good point. Many newbies are not used to posting requests for help in forums (much less coaxing help from an open source community). Understanding how to use good titles for help requests, what information to include in the post, that they should follow up their request with the answer if they find it elsewhere--all of these are effective strategies for using forums.

I just looked at the forum posting instructions (node/add/forum) that appear at the top of the input form. No explanations about using effective titles. I've created a documentation issue for this here.

Love your posts, Kate!

robertdouglass commented 13 September 2005 at 15:40

Is it possible that the closing </em> is missing from your signature? Everything coming after your posts is italicized.

I just wanted to add that you have a very good idea, and that there are three existing solutions that I can think of that would also play a part.

- node words module which applies metdata to posts (including influencing the search results)
- categories. If we could tag our posts people could search by category easier.
- voting. If we could "rate this post", it might help in sorting the helpful from the cruft.

As eldarin points out, gaming the system will always be a problem, but usually the number of well-intended users here far outweighs the people causing problems.

- Robert Douglass

-----
Rate the value of this post: http://rate.affero.net/robertDouglass/
I recommend CivicSpace: www.civicspacelabs.org
My sites: www.hornroller.com, www.robshouse.net

Mysterious Goings On

katie1n commented 13 September 2005 at 22:33

Thanks for the heads up about em's. They seem to get out of hand whenever I turn my back for even a second...

Kate
That's STAT! NOT Start

I agree with Casperl

fiyaz commented 13 September 2005 at 10:11

Bright idea looking forward for such forum !!

Sooooo..... whatever came of this topic??? Any solution??

divawebmistress commented 14 March 2006 at 10:39

As I was browsing through this topic, hoping that it was going to answer itself or find an answer eventually.... but I didn't.

I read and skipped a few cause it was too much of nothing.

Simply put, is there a "newbie" section for so-called "silly newbie" questions? If so, where is it cause right about now, I need it.

Here are some of my issues if some "drupal expert" out there does not mind taking a look at.

Who's online? status..... does this show the true numbers? If so, why is it that when I view my site as a visitor, it shows me a different number than when I am logged on?

Where and how can I use my own "stats code". I have one in place, but I don't know if it's recording properly. What page should I have my code in?

Can someone look at my site to see if it's working properly? And if not, please tell me what I'm doing wrong.....PLEASE!!!

Images..... I can use html coding to place images in my blogs, forums, etc. But what about images for users? I can't seem to use an image as a user. What is the general size, settings, etc.?

How can I show a different page other than the initial page I'm getting now? In other words, when I create my websites, I can create a directory and have an index file with having a different look for each page if I wanted too. I want a different looking page, what do I do?

Lastly (for now), how the heck do I do this....awesome page!. This does not look like it's a drupal site like mine. Mine is boring.

I'm borderline between "newbie" (to new ideas, technology, etc.) to "expert" (old school programming, self-taught, self-learned, capable of picking it up, etc.) If people just talked in lamens term, we'd all get it. If folks can make their instructions simpler (i.e, "to do this, here's what you do, and here's what it will look like, and this is the thing that makes it do that")

It's tough enough that my brain has to decode all the stuff I'm trying to do, but when I need answers, I want someone to talk to me in simple terms so that I can rest and absorb the information.

Am I getting through to anyone on this or am I looking silly right about now? I really don't care if I look silly, but I'm sure I am speaking for some folks in general here.

The purpose for a "forum, support, etc." is for helping those in "need", not the opportunity for someone to brag. Hey, we know you know..... that's why we are asking. So, if you can help, please HELP. And yes, I agree with the person that said "don't give us answers like "asked already, now go search for it". Search for what? If our question is not "relevant" (according to the hierarchy structure of the search tool), then it is buried in the "500" postings. And with that, I'm beyond frustration and my questions are still unanswered.

Luckily, I'm somewhat of a geek that I can figure things out myself. But there are some things that I want an answer for. Because why should I reinvent the wheel if someone else had already done it?

Thank you for allowing me to voice my opinions, questions, and frustrations. If any experts would like to help a Diva out, I would be more than appreciative and humbled to listen to your knowledgeable answers.

Humbly and respectfully yours,
Diva Webmistress

http://ranchcardoso.biz/rcForum
http://bodyinparadise.com/bpForum

Ok, so where is it?

KidByte commented 6 October 2007 at 02:24

This long discussion has definitely hit the point for me. I hate to ask questions in this site because when I do searches for my questions, the answers are many times curt and to the point; and nearly always I find a "Search for the answer first before asking!". You don't have to slap my wrist many times to make me STOP asking ANY questions.

So WHERE is the Newbie forum?

KidByte

=-=

vm commented 6 October 2007 at 02:38

There isn't one. Keep in mind this bit of of fact as well. Newbie forum or no newbie forum, your answers would come from the same small group of people who help support drupal in all the forums. Of the over 100K users on drupal.org a small fraction of them take the time to answer questions on a consistent basis. That being said, There would be no real difference in the personalities between a "newbie" forum and any other on drupal.org.

I think the most poignant point in the thread about a "newbie forum" is this

If we segregate 'newbies' then we risk people never realizing when they should move to the other forums. If we mix them in this melting pot, you never know what inspiration will be generated. It's fun to watch people who consider themselves still newbies answer questions that three months earlier they would never have figured out.

That being said: if being asked to search put me in a position to not ask any questions, I'd have to question my own sticktuitiveness. I know myself that I often use the search to answer others questions during my times of support. Often linking to the answers. More often then not though, a user wants such a breakdown of the information that it would take an extended amount of time to answer in a step by step by sub step by step answer. We learn by playing , by testing, by making mistakes and sometimes making the same mistakes over and over again.

I find far too often, that others read a tone into typed word that just isn't there. Afterall some of the biggest arguments happen over the best of intentions and those intentions get taken wrongly or taken out of context.

Good Luck in your endeavors and don't fear asking questions. Allowing fear to take the wheel and steer leaves a vehicle unmanned.
_____________________________________________________
Signature removed: so as not to offend the newbies : )

"If we segregate 'newbies'

KidByte commented 6 October 2007 at 03:06

"If we segregate 'newbies' then we risk people never realizing when they should move to the other forums."

Perhaps you underestimate newbies. As we find more difficult questions, we will go to better resources; be that drupal.org or third parties. I do believe if you give newbies a relaxed area to ask our "stupid" questions, we will help each other and grow into very good Drupal citizens. Then, as we move into the other forums, we will help other newbies without bringing along bad attitudes.

But just my opinion. :-)

KidByte

=-=

vm commented 6 October 2007 at 12:57

The point that seems overlooked in my own words on my post is:

There would be no real difference in the personalities between a "newbie" forum and any other on drupal.org.

That being said: It just creates yet another forum for support minded people to have to watch, track and answer in. Newbies are more then welcome to grab newbie questions out of the forums already provided and many already do without the need for another forum. You may not believe this to be true and you are entitled to your own beliefs. All I can do is try to provide for you some responses from the side of someone who does take the time to support Drupal in the forums and doesn't like to see any question go unanswered. I hope you don't take the following as being a slapped wrist.

That aside though:

Some facts:
I've taken a look at your tracker. see: http://drupal.org/user/187373/track
You've been involved in the Drupal community for about 2 weeks. (As of the time of this comment of mine)
You've created a single topic ( http://drupal.org/node/178354 ), which gives you an answer that seems to have fixed your problem per your last comment in that thread.
You've commented in 3 other posts by 3 other users, including the one we are in now. Oddly enough I've not seen you be told to search a single time. Nor have I seen anyone be curt with you. Direct is what direct does, though. There are more questions to be answered then there are support people and sometimes this causes those doing the supporting to try to cut right to the chase.

You've not been part of the community very long and that is ok. However, I can't see where you've personally been treated curtly, direct or had your wrist slapped.

The idea that you believe people have "bad attitudes" is your own opinion and you are definetly entitled to it. Even if it reads alot like judging a book by it's cover. I will point out though that judging the entire community based on individuals that you don't have any direct experience with in the forums, isn't very open minded. Also take note that depending on the threads you are referencing (you didn't link to any) and the age of those threads, the people you are labeling, may not even be part of the community any longer.

Something else to try and keep in mind is that not everyone on Drupal.org speaks English natively. As such, some posts may come across as curt and direct specifically because the answer giver grasped the concept of the question but may not be fluent enough to be as descriptive as the thread creator would have liked or expected. Peoples expectations often cloud their judgement when their expectations are not met completely or to their satisfaction.

Believe it or not, even those who you deem curt and direct who have taken the time to try and answer a question are trying to help. They may not be as helpful as you may have liked, but helpful none the less. Drupal.org has grown quite a bit since this thread was started (2 years ago) and even since the last comment on this thread before yours (1.5 years ago). I mention this because in a community of over 100K registered users, not every one of them will be a knight in shining armor. Like every other large community, both IRL (In Real Life) and on the internet, there are varying degrees of every personality trait.

Coming from someone who pays quite a bit of attention to the forums (probably too much by most peoples standards). I see more and more new users stepping up and grabbing the Drupal bull by the horns. Answering questions in the fourms & writing handbook pages which are of the new user perspective. This is a wonderful thing.

For every thread like this where people voice that Drupal support isn't very good or is in some way intimidating, there is at least one thread where a user states drupal support forums rock, are awesome, are the best. In an internet community where no threads are purged it is often the case that you can find threads to try and cement your perspective regardless of what side of this type of debate you are on.

In the end, is the drupal community perfect ? absolutley not. Nothing is perfect. Everything that is thought to be perfect will be put so far under the microscope so as to find some thing, any thing wrong with it, rendering it imperfect once again.

In closing, I'd like to note that I've never seen anyone deem a question as being stupid. If this has happened, I've missed that thread. Any and all questions are allowed to be asked on Drupal.org where they relate to drupal.org or its contrib modules. Though It is sometimes better to ask a module support question in the module issue query where the sub community who uses that module are far more likely to be subscribed to the issue query and can provide specific support for a module they use.

and last but not least a side note: Newbies are welcome to purchase any one of the books on the market these days that break down Drupal in a way that allows , yes even newbies , to understand what is going on inside Drupal. Pro Drupal Development (The book I suggest) is a good book based on Drupal 5, to help new/old users get a much better grasp on what is going on in the background and how to go about certain things they would want to accomplish. That being said, there are more books coming to market which expand on the methodologies and ideologies of Drupal that everyone should have in their library and be working with. will reading the book give you complete control over Drupal at one sitting ? probably not. However, it will expand ones knowledge in ways one wouldn't think to ask on the forums.

_____________________________________________________________________
Signature removed so as not to offend anyone : )

re no purged threads

patrickharris commented 7 October 2007 at 00:37

Good point VeryMisunderstood about no threads being purged. Unlike many other forums, I've never seen a controversial or inflammatory thread deleted here at drupal.org.

...

sepeck commented 8 October 2007 at 04:08

It does happen about two or three times a year in the event of a direct name calling flame out. In some announcement threads off topic posts will be removed. Generally the people involved are sent a warning or a notice. More often we try and lock the thread before it descends to that level.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Sir, I didn't mean for you

KidByte commented 7 October 2007 at 23:39

Sir,

I didn't mean for you to have to create such a huge reply, but it is appreciated. The only point I want to address in your reply is that you misread what I said. You did not have to check my user history. I did not say that anyone had been curt in answers to ME; had MY wrist slapped, etc. I just saw this situation among others during my searches for information. When you see it, you tend to believe it is how things are.

Lastly, you guys have created a great product, a wonderful website and a long future for me and others in learning. Thanks for all your help. I will do my best to be a good Drupal citizen to the world.

Kid

=-=

vm commented 8 October 2007 at 00:16

I don't believe I misread:

you said:

You don't have to slap my wrist many times to make me STOP asking ANY questions.

where you refer specifically to "you" in the example. As such, I referred to "you" in my example.

While I understand after researching your tracker that it didn't happen "to you" as I stated in my comment and backed up by my quote below, where I've bolded.

I will point out though that judging the entire community based on individuals that you don't have any direct experience with in the forums, isn't very open minded. Also take note that depending on the threads you are referencing (you didn't link to any) and the age of those threads, the people you are labeling, may not even be part of the community any longer.

also, no need to call me "sir" : ) That would be my father. ; )

_____________________________________________________________________
Confucius says:
"Those who seek drupal answers should use drupal search!" : )

This is exactly what I have been talking about.

KidByte commented 8 October 2007 at 00:28

This is exactly what I have been talking about. "Let's belittle the newb."

I am sorry, but I don't participate in flames. [conversation over]

=-=

vm commented 8 October 2007 at 00:30

: ) uh?¿?

No one here is flaming you. Nor is any one belitting you. I am not directing any hostility toward you at all. I will however, apologize that you are feeling as if you are being attacked. That's just not the case here.

I merely redirected to try and explain to you, as politely as possible, that I didn't misread you. I did so using quotes from both comments, one of yours & one of my own as foundation. I like to be thorough & use examples ; )

Your adverse reaction seem to fit perfectly with the statement I made earlier, in a comment when I engaged in this conversation with you:

I find far too often, that others read a tone into typed word that just isn't there.

All that aside though, you may be interested in The Drupal Cookbook (for beginners). Which should give you a new users perspective of Drupal. It was written by nancyw, who at the time or writing was indeed a new user of Drupal and feeling her way around the program. She may still consider herself as as a new user even though shes already contributing modules to the community and already has multiple sites built and deployed.

_____________________________________________________________________
Confucius says:
"Those who seek drupal answers should use drupal search!" : )

belittle?

Drupalace-1 commented 8 January 2008 at 07:17

Not that anyone's asking for a second opinion, but for what it's worth, I don't see a hint of "belittling" in VeryMisunderstood's response. (Nor in any of the zillion helpful posts I've seen from VM.)

KidByte, don't be too quick to run off. I've asked some grade-A newbie questions here, and generally find everyone helpful.

--------
A site by, of, and for the Drupal newbie: http://www.drupalace.com

I think the cookbook is a

darumaki commented 5 December 2007 at 04:07

I think the cookbook is a great place for newbies to start, the problem is it's not in a location where a newbie can spot it right away.

http://drupal.org/handbooks ( nothing here )
http://drupal.org/support ( nothing here )

It's tucked away under tutorials and how to, personally I think the cookbook needs to be right on top under getting stated.

Where it's located now, it could take a newbiew days or even weeks to find it, i never new it existed until a was searching and saw a post that happen to link to it.

All in favor of moving the cookbook to the top handbook page under getting started say AY AY AY

=-=

vm commented 5 December 2007 at 13:15

It's one click off the main page, under tutorials because that is what it is.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

Thanks for pointing to the

cellmaker commented 5 December 2007 at 14:50

Thanks for pointing to the cookbook, joninpo.

As a newbie, I don't find Drupal intuitive. I do, however, find Drupalers (we just had a DC Meetup) exceptionally helpful, which gives me hope.

What would I love to see? Some sort of description of the way Drupal works; a conceptual framework, if you will. Not another reiteration of: Well, there are nodes, and stories, and modules, etc. The *idea* of it, I mean.

I'll try an example. Suppose someone were visiting from some planet in another galaxy and had no concept of a house. They arrive and someone says, well, you need a place to live, like a house, and the alien says, "House? What's that?"

Now, this alien probably has an idea of what a place to live is (where you sleep and eat and keep your clothes, etc.) but the particulars of how we organize that may be foreign.

As far as I can tell, experienced Drupalers tend to approach the "What's a house?" question in a variety of ways:

• Well, there are many ways to make a house. Check out the modules. They're great!
• Well, houses have faucets and light switches and beds and security systems. You can put them all in one place or spread them around in different rooms, or you can let them all appear in the foyer if you want. Check out the forums. They're great!
• Etc.

The problem is that the concept of the house is still left unexplained. Nobody has said, "Well, we live in houses, and houses have rooms and hallways and doors and windows and a roof and floor. People won't come into your house unless you invite them. Usually we eat in the dining room and cook in the kitchen and do unmentionables in the bedroom and bathroom. To get from one room to another, you usually use a hallway and/or doorway (even if there are other ways to go from one room to another, such as via elevator or by secret passage under the swimming pool). All the rooms touch each other so that we don't have to go outside to switch rooms. Every house has to have a roof or you'll get all wet. Now there are lots of ways of making a house, but here's a very small and normal house (sketch sketch). Let's build it, shall we?

In my old world, websites had pages, and pages could include static content, dynamically generated content, or "included" content from other pages, etc. You placed links to move from one room to another. Groups of content were organized by menus, which usually linked to the main page of a group of content. You could fairly easily draw a map of your site, even when the content was dynamically generated.

Drupal does not seem to be constructed that way, but I can't seem to find any (obvious) place where this is discussed. Instead, it always starts with, Well, in Drupal we have nodes and blocks....

In the Cookbook, one author said, "I changed my front page from node to story, not page." So I went and did that just to see, and all the content that was previously on my front "page" (which apparently was not a page, but a node) disappeared. How one then fills the front page "story" with content is a mystery. Plus, I thought a node was a bit of content, but it appears it is a container for content. I'm sure the author had a wonderful reason for changing his front "node" to a "story", but the wherefores of this are missing. I am no longer even sure that the front page is like a page at all.

And so the concept of how Drupal works is not obvious. It is doubtless better than the old way or people wouldn't be so enthusiastic, but getting from one paradigm to another requires a map, not a bunch of "push here and pull there" type of instructions.

Anyway, if someone knows a resource that gives the 1000-foot view of things, that would be wonderful.

Charles

=-=

vm commented 5 December 2007 at 18:52

the node path lists all nodes (or published to front page content) this is the "container" as you put it.

if you wanted to change to a list of the story content type you would have to use taxonomy and enter your path to the terms you want listed or use views.module.

therefore yes, the terminiology node depending on what you are doing has two functions.

if you are creating content, you are creating a node.

if you want to list your nodes you would use the node path.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

The Drupal Tongue

darumaki commented 6 December 2007 at 15:30

Will you listen to what you just said, repeat it out loud while looking at yourself into a mirror

an analogy if I may of speaking in drupal tongue

begin drupal tongue - >
"the african killer bear often chases bees throughout New York but when the lion meets the tiger they go to starbucks and afterwards they learn how to write nodes and chase other wild fire."
end drupal tonge - >

does anyone have a clue of what I just said ? :))

One of the biggest challenges newbies face is understanding the "Drupal Tounge" its an insane language that is not understandable in plain english. I'll admin drupal has got some power under the hood but the language it uses is not user or web friendly and the over-kill of having to input php code to over-ride theme styles by newbies is madness. A web designer shouldn't have to know how to code just to style. CSS use to be stupidly simple until drupal took that away but I hear drupal 6 will be better in this area.

If it means anything, the more I learn about drupal the better I understand the tongue and the madness, take it one day at a time but don't expect any immediate aha.

=-=

vm commented 6 December 2007 at 16:34

It may help to understand the terminology to do two things.

A) read the terminology documentation page = http://drupal.org/node/937 for more overview see: http://drupal.org/node/21951

B) grab a dictionary

Did I feel like a fish out of water when I began with Drupal ? yes. Did that stop me from trying to learn the terminology so I could communicate with drupal and it's users ? no.

taxonomy in its simpliest definition is the science or technique of classification.. Many CMS's use "categories". Taxonomy is unique because it doesn't have to be categories / sub categories. Does this make Drupal wrong ? no. The developers chose a more liquid word for a more liquid CMS. Some sites I build use the standard categories set up, while other sites I use taxonomy for "tags".

When creating taxonomy, you have a vocabulary (you may call this a container) and terms (you may call them categories) associated with that vocabulary (container)

a node is "a centering point of component parts". your component parts are whatever fields you have in a content type (the centering point).

content is whatever you deem content to be. in whatever content type you choose. Be it story, page, blog, forum or with the addition of CCK, anything content type you feel like creating.

The biggest part of the problem lies in the fact that those versed in Drupal terminology took the time to learn it. It isn't as difficult as many make it out to be. It's simply different.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

Well...I read the title

Bobuido commented 11 December 2007 at 16:33

Please excuse me if I echo points already made or ask questions already answered. I can't commit the time to read all of this gigantic and fierce debate. I would like to throw in my opinion though

I think it makes sense to have a knowledge base, or, a problem solution DB (if you prefer)

As I see it, the posts (questions and answers) need to be grouped / related, user voted / weighted and tagged. One solution can be relevant for many questions, if only in part. The forums are missing this relational aspect, unless someone is kind enough to provide a link to another post. Relationships could potentially be made with other nodes. e.g. text tutorial, video tutorial, case study.

Drupal.org forums are huge which is both a hindrance and a help. Of course it's lovely to have a big resource but wading through can sometimes be a real pain. I would imagine the majority of users are fairly new and it's this that puts such a massive strain on the Drupal.org support forums.

In my eyes, the "newbie" problem is a tricky one. Segregation kinda makes sense. Let the newbies help the newbies. Between them they can work it out leaving the elite to focus their time on much more complex and/or pressing issues. Thing is... It also kinda seems to blow a hole in the community ethos...Plus when has segregation ever been a force for good?

TBH I really don't know the solution but...

A - I would like to give back what little knowledge I have gained
B - i would like to write / help while I still have some newbie perspective
C - I would like to create a place where aggressive / insulting / discouraging behaviour towards newbies and so called "stupid questions" can be avoided

I'm interested in creating a knowledge base using Drupal where many newbie problems can be caught. It would be for a range of FOSS solutions, not just Drupal. If the community behind this system fails to resolve the problem it can be passed onto the wider/larger communities. I think such a system / site would benefit from a points system. Incentives, provided by myself, would help encourage a pleasant resolution, rather than a not so nice RTFM post.

If I struggle with this task due to difficulty and/or time I am willing to put up a bounty to get this set up

It's time I started giving back to wonderful community

Your thoughts on this idea / proposal are welcomed - Please contact me if you are interested in getting involved in such a site
(be it moderator, developer, sponsor etc.)

Let's encourage people as much as we can! It's for the greater good of Drupal!

Newbie knowledge base?

Drupalace-1 commented 8 January 2008 at 07:47

Bobuido,

A good post which reflects some of my own thoughts. Like you, I've skimmed the debate but can't claim to have digested it all. A few comments anyway, at the risk of misunderstanding or repeating some of the main discussion:

One item you mention hits a key nail on the head for me: With all of Drupal's great features for tagging, ranking, and otherwise organizing content, why do the forums utilize so little of it? The lack of tagging (taxonomy), in particular, mystifies me: when we make forum posts, why aren't we applying the tags that best fit the post?

As it is now, when I have a problem with, say, blocks, I have to use "blocks" in a word search, and I get a gabillion posts returned that may just mention "blocks" in passing. If we were using tags, I could hone right in on posts that are truly "about" blocks (as indicated by the poster taking trouble to apply "blocks" as a tag).

Same with ratings of post helpfulness, relationships to other posts, etc. BUT, it's of course easier to say "let's add these cool features!" than to actually work out how to do it. What would be the tagging and rating schemes? What new difficulties would arise if posters used the features wrongly (or not at all)? And so on. (There may be very good reasons why the forum builders didn't add such features; anyone know?)

I'm getting off topic, though; while I think the forums could probably be made easier for all (including newbies) to use, the key proposal is whether there should be some new, different knowledge base for newbies.

Hmm. My immediate thought would mirror the stuff above about forums: Yes, it'd be great and nifty... but there are questions to consider first:

* Are the existing forums already enough (especially if made easier to search)?
* Aren't the Handbooks, Cookbook, etc. already, in whole or part, newbie knowledge bases? (If so, simply making their existence more visible to newbies would solve much.)
* If the Handbooks and Cookbook aren't satisfactory newbie resources, is some editing/reorganizing of these all that's needed?
* If there were a new knowledge base, how would we decide what is and isn't a "newbie" issue? (And who decides?)
* Would such a knowledge base segregate newbies (and is that a good or bad thing?)

All of which cleverer minds have already pointed out in earlier posts. Sorry, I'm just repeating questions here, to give the issue a bounce. It's an interesting topic, and I think a project could result
– if (and it's a big if) we can identify a type and format of newbie-oriented content that would be useful, and isn't already well-covered by existing resources.

--------
A site by, of, and for the Drupal newbie: http://www.drupalace.com

Drupal and using Drupal really is quite difficult

oonumberoo commented 8 January 2008 at 10:08

Last year I was told that I should really use a DMS site and was told to try Drupal. The person who hosts my current website uses it and so all I had to do was log in to the basic test site he set up. I was then left on my own, with little computer experience, but he helps out all the time.

After a few weeks I gave up and found Joomla. I though that this was brilliant and so user friendly. The help for a beginner is so vastly superior to Drupal. Click here, do that, click here and there you are.

I then found that I could not do exactly as I wanted, came back, my friend wrote a bit of code and things have been fine. I only work with text and have not ventured into images yet.

Drupal users range from 'What is a mouse?' people to tip top experts. And the help available covers the same range, except that it appears all jumbled up. As they say of the Bible, it is all there if you can find it and decode it, but it does not have an index.

I really do think that the help could be more user friendly. I cannot be more positive as I gave up on the various help sources.

Maybe, when my site is up and running, I will have more time to put into this debate.

Thank to all.

Maybe I'm just really bad at searching for stuff...

Bobuido commented 14 January 2008 at 18:56

I just think we could boil down the huge amount of info into some form of uber-faq

As I see it, the system here is pretty good, yet I still rarely hit on what I need to find

I love the in-Drupal help and everything here on Drupal.org but still can't help but feel we need a better KB / FAQ

Efficiency in resolving your own problems is the goal

I think the key to it working is good user input (voting / weighting / moderating) perhaps cold hard cash prizes for the most helpful active contributors?

Maybe I'm just really bad at searching for stuff...

Issue category is too broad

cellmaker commented 17 January 2008 at 00:37

I think calling everything that looks like "Why is this happening?" or "How do I?" a Post-Installation issue is really, really broad.

I just did a little analysis of that forum (44000 topics) and found that 11000 had no responses at all. Obviously some of those may be because the questions were badly put or people didn't know how to respond, but I bet a whole lot of them went wanting because they simply slipped off the first page of topics before they were really noticed.

The more popular Drupal gets, the more likely it is that the pot of issues will fill up faster and faster, with the # of topics that go unanswered growing even faster (proportionally).

Seems a disaggregated approach might make it easier to find answers to questions already put forth and make it easier for people who wish to help to identify areas where they have special expertise.

As an example the Filemaker Forums (also run basically by a community, not by Filemaker) are really useful because issues are broken out pretty well.

What would need to happen to start a more fine-grained approach?

Charlie

omg who is reading all this

LM23 commented 17 January 2008 at 02:50

omg who is reading all this stuff here ;D
A pagination would be nice though ;)

Cheers,
Laura

Indeed!

Drupalace-1 commented 18 January 2008 at 14:43

That is *exactly* what I've thought many times. "Post-installation" is a *huge* category, almost a catch-all for just about everything.

With post-installation broken down into more detailed categories, and forum posts putting Drupal's own taxonomy system to use instead of strangely ignoring it, I think the forums will become much easier to search.

--------
A site by, of, and for the Drupal newbie: http://www.drupalace.com

...

sepeck commented 19 January 2008 at 02:50

This thread was started two years ago. Drupal had several reason not to do this. They ranged from technical (over burdened server and not the best optimized queries in forum module) to philosophical (didn't want to segregate users). The server environment has substantially changed and tracker is much more efficient.

We're not ignoring things, we're just balancing out several issues that people do not always realize are related. After Drupal 6 is released I will give it some more thought.

I still fail to see how segregating a class of users when they are asking essentially the same questions as others will help though.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

I've been at Drupal now for

domineaux commented 19 January 2008 at 05:42

I've been at Drupal now for appx a month.

The forums are helpful and many posters go out of their way to help.

That is darned special for Open-Source CMS.

I do think I've gotta spend alot more time studying how to structure my sites to apply content properly.

-------------------------------

Example... I'm working on a site

Reviews - with lots of different categories, images, documents and files.

Previews - with lots of different categories, images, documents and files

Downloads - with lots of different categories, images, documents and files.

News - with lots of different categories, images, documents and files.

------------------------------

I think a principle thing that will help a lot of newbies is how to structure and build sites around the content.

Building Menus that aren't too cumbersome, yet effective for dealing with the content is an issue for sure

Modules should require a context sensitive help map explaining what each module entry item does.

I've spent hours messing with a module trying to get it right.

My problem was I checked some darn box in the module entry screen I shouldn't have.

Heck, it doesn't have to be on-the-fly type context sensitive help.

A simple page of explanation with each entry item would probably do the trick.

I messed with the PathAuto for 3 days, before I started to get a feel for it.

If there had been an explanation page of all the entry items for using the module I might have spent 3 hours.

To be real honest... I'm still not too sure I've got it figured out. LOL

Video tutorials pretty well suck for the most part, because the video quality is so poor.

It amazes me that people go to all the trouble to produce a video and accept so poor quality.

Examples of some very good training information

The Views documentation and the CCK Handbook are excellent for learning to use those modules.

http://drupal.org/node/109604

http://drupal.org/modules/cck/documentation

You have to carefully study the information, but you will eventually understand a great deal about how to present your content on your sites. The above documents are long winded and very detailed. You really have to put on your thinking cap and study them to get an understanding of just what each module can do. It is really darned amazing how much work has gone into them and how flexible they are to do some very difficult tasks that saves us from doing a bunch of coding.

I suggest to anyone starting with Drupal - search for as much documented information on a module as possible. Concentrate on each module and work with it on your non-production site first. Try a bunch of things of interest, before you put up the site for users.

Mis-aimed reply?

Drupalace-1 commented 23 January 2008 at 16:53

Sepeck, I think your reply may have been intended for someone else's comment. (No harm done.) For the record, my comment doesn't suggest newbie forums (I share the concerns about segregation, and how to even define what is and isn't "newbie").

My comment only suggests that perhaps some massively broad forums, like "Post-installation", could be broken into more detailed categories; and that perhaps forum posts should make use of Drupal's own excellent taxonomy system. Both of these would make it much easier to hone in on answers to questions, IMHO.

(And on the other hand, both ideas may have been considered and dumped long ago for good reasons.)

--------
A site by, of, and for the Drupal newbie: http://www.drupalace.com

Let's put it another way

Bobuido commented 24 January 2008 at 16:15

I'd like to see and possibly even set up a knowledge base

The main benefit from this would be to take the strain off of the forums (Post Installation in particular)

The knowledge base _would_first_ concentrate largely on the easiest tasks and primary tasks (That's how I define newbie) but any post would be welcome! Segregating users may not be the best idea, even though the newb and the elite do seem to aggravate each other

There should be a huge amount of inexperienced users (say under a year) compared to veterans (e.g. 3+ years?)

It is these inexperienced requests which flood the forum

We can tag the post rather the person - I would define a newbie post as a simple date calculation

Number of days between: Date of first Drupal Contact (Profile-Static) and Date of Post (of their problem)

Therefore it is not the person that brings the definition (they always becoming more experienced) but the post - A newbie post

Of course some moderation will be needed to organise and tag things properly but what system doesn't need moderating!

Please let me know if you would like to contribute (paid or volunteer) to such a KB project

I would be happy to run it on a non-profit basis

I have some other thoughts on the matter but I'll leave them for another day

EDIT: Does anyone know of similar projects being run or planned?

New content? Or just links?

Drupalace-1 commented 26 January 2008 at 11:20

So, the basic idea is a KB of the most common newbie issues, correct?

Certainly would help many. But to repeat a previous question: Do the many, many existing drupal.org resources – the forums, and key items under Handbooks, esp. Tutorials and How-Tos – already contain all the info that would make sense for such a KB?

In other words, do you think there's *new* knowledge needed that isn't somewhere in the drupal.org site? Or is the knowledge already pretty much there within the site, just too disorganized (and mixed in with advanced stuff) for the newbie to effectively use? (Sorry if you've abundantly covered that and I missed it.)

If it's a problem of digging up info already inside the drupal.org site, perhaps the KB could be as simple as a master page of links, organized by topics. Like a header "Working With Blocks", followed by links to tutorials and Cookbook articles and forum posts that do a good job of explaining blocks in newbie terms... then the header "Working With Menus", followed again by links to appropriate newbie resources...

A scenario based on that: A newbie asks in the forums, "I don't understand how to create and place menus." Helpful forum respondents reply with, "I suggest you check out 'Working With Menus' on the Newbie KB page." The newbie goes there and find links to a couple of tutorials on menus, a Cookbook article, and a handful of forum posts that have explored the topic.

In this scenario, the KB offered no actual new content. But it saved the newbie from having to pick through scattered resources (probably missing some key ones, especially hard-to-find forum posts), and saved forum respondents the need to perform an on-the-spot search for specific resources to recommend in a typed reply (which would then get lost in the depths of the forums anyway...)

Do you think that'd be a useful form for the KB you envision? Of course, creating such a list of links wouldn't guarantee that it'd get *used*; the links would have to actually be useful, and be organized in a clean manner that supports quickly finding the desired topic. And the whole thing would have to be prominently featured on the site so that newbies could find it on their own, and so that pros would remember it as a resource when facing newbie questions. Otherwise, it'd become just the latest in the line of well-meaning but ultimately overlooked resources!

...

sepeck commented 27 January 2008 at 00:47

Anyone can add such content to the handbook already.
Best under the How To section.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

...

sepeck commented 24 January 2008 at 17:11

It was a consolidated reply to the last few and was merely an explanation for the why in many cases.

The problem with segmentation is that Drupal is complex and there are often multiple different ways to accomplish a given task. Which one is best depends on desired goal, experience of the implementor and any considerations of how Drupal works.

In any case, nothing will be done until after Drupal 6 is released and we see what tools and things we can do with the new forum changes that it brings us. drupal.org is already a very busy and complex site to maintain for very few people, adding modules requires consideration and planning not just on features, but sustainable support going forward as well.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Where there was an

Bobuido commented 27 January 2008 at 18:07

@Drupalace

---Definition---
"So, the basic idea is a KB of the most common newbie issues, correct?"
Primarily, that is idea. There is no reason I can see whY it would have to be restricted to these problems.

Perhaps this is a more accurate definition
A KB that is focused on, but not limited to, documenting the support forum's most commonly occurring problems. It would rely heavily on user input (weighting, relating, tagging, content submission etc.) and drive this user input through reward schemes.

---Linking to external resources---
Where there was an appropriate resource on Drupal.org then I'm sure it could just be linked

However if the content linked to needed:

Expansion (perhaps a screen-shot or more detailed content)
Editing (perhaps the language used is confusing)

Then it may be better just to re-write the resource

Links wouldn't have to be confined to linking to Drupal.org - Another could be http://www.lullabot.com - Or any site for that matter

Links could be added to any KB content type - Tutorials, training courses...anything!

I've pretty much convinced myself this is a worthwhile project. Even if the forums did improve significantly, I still feel there is merit in a KB built with Drupal. I feel that, at the very least, it's a worthwhile experiment.

@Sepeck - I get the impression you think this is something I expect of Drupal.org and / or yourself. This is not the case. I raise the issue here in the hope for discussion and support. I'm not trying to convince people to start making changes to this site. I'd actually like to expand the (Drupal as a KB) concept to a range of FOSS solutions. If it works :)

[ Current (Main) Project: www.pellet-burner-specialists.co.uk ]

..

sepeck commented 28 January 2008 at 08:22

There seems to be some language and terminology confusion. The handbooks are a FAQ., And a how to.

In general we are resistant to off site resources. Why? Because pretty much every last one of them is gone. We have everything you just posted in the handbooks already. We have a centralized searchable resource in existence right now. All you have to do is click on the 'Add a child page' link in the appropriate section or Create content > Book page.

We have hot to's and tutorials, we have videos. All we need is contributions.
http://drupal.org/node/24572

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

No confusion there

Bobuido commented 28 January 2008 at 12:50

I realise what the handbook is but if I'm brutally honest I've not yet found it that helpful

The same (pretty much) goes for the search facility and forums

The FAQ isn't exactly huge (for a project of this size)

The bigger problem is not contributions, it is information architecture

You also seem to suffer from the truly open model
i.e. You have people, some with English as their second language, creating resources (mainly forum posts) that are not quality checked / edited

What I am proposing is that the KB is heavily edited / moderated

This is not achievable with the Drupal.org forums - The sheer volume of information prevents this from happening

It's kind of like the difference between using Google and DMOZ i.e. More results does not always mean better results

Drupal.org does not:

Allow User Weighting / Voting
Allow node relations (unless you count hyper-linking - which does not seem to happen enough)
Allow tagging / free tagging (I've seen this in limited use on Drupal.org)
Operate a bounty system for encouraging documentation

Please do not take this as some sort of an attack. The main problem is really that the Drupal project has become so popular that you have a flood of inexperienced users bombarding the resources. I only want to help alleviate this problem. If I discover some techniques that work well in the "Drupal as a KB" experiment...well, that's just a bonus.

Current (Main) Project: www.pellet-burner-specialists.co.uk

Getting Started versus Levels of Expertise

jamescarvin commented 3 April 2008 at 01:51

I can appreciate that topic based forums should be sufficient so long as community is sweet and patient with newbies. I have been very frustrated looking for information on both forums and documentation as I've attempted to learn drupal over the past two weeks. Worse, precisely because the information is hard to find and not really organized, I've made some time-consuming mistakes. And since these mistakes are on the dime of my clients, expensive ones, as they not so patiently wait for me to convert their sites over to CMS from html, as I promised them I would, having heard that CMS was so easy you didn't even need to know php to do it.

I know that everyone's time is important. So I spend my own very valuable time trying to find information before asking questions that have probably been answered many times already. Only to find I can't find the answers. So I break down and find what appears the most appropriate place to ask the question, which in itself takes much time, hoping not to anger anyone. So here I am, having found this thread on a search for how to get started, figuring a thread on absolute beginners might do the trick - here because I key searched on beginners, or some such thing.

I then read that someone is using /tracker and not even aware of what forum they are in. And I notice that a lot of the thread in question, although it is about starting a forum for absolute beginners contains a bunch of php code. Well, people using tools like tracker maybe explains that. You've got experts drifting in and out looking at single threads and not realizing there are people who will have no clue what you are talking about, in situations like me, totally frustrated, bleary eyed and in a hurry to get projects completed, not even having started yet, because of fear of starting the wrong way.

Which brings me to my present situation. In reading a joomla tutorial I installed xAmpp, thinking I would be better off testing my sites before making them go live/public. Then I discovered drupal and decided maybe in the long run, I'd be better off with drupal. And about a week later, reading through many forum threads and still not getting my questions answered, I decided to be patient and read a "Getting Started" manual. Boy, the writer made it sound so easy!

Only one problem. He suggested downloading DevSide Suite, which I did. And nobody warned me that I had to first uninstall xAmpp. The result was nothing worked. Well, I did get both programs uninstalled (hopefully) but now - two full weeks into all this - I have read even more forum posts. And I'm wondering what the best version to install is and what the best package to install is too.

1. As I understand it the weakness of the latest 6+ version is that the users haven't had time to develop working modules for it yet. So in the long run it will be more powerful and make sense, just not yet. So maybe I should install the latest 5+ version instead. Maybe. And that is one thing I want to discuss.

2. I heard that the 5.3+ install came bundled with the devSide suite. So that leaves me wondering whether the 6+ version also has this in the bundle. Does it?

3. I'm wondering just how hard it is to run two versions on my development server at home. If so, what is the PRECISE unconfusing procedure first for installation, second for use.

4. I need to know how to transfer my sites to a server to make them go live once they seem ready.

5. I'm a Dreamweaver user so I'm wondering what the scoop is on a so called "Dreamweaver Extension." Is this ready? What exactly does it do?

6. I've been hearing about Samba here. I'm not sure what this does. It was used in a forum that didn't explain it. But it sounded like something maybe I should have and use. (Note to self: Googling it may be faster than waiting for a forum reply, and certainly appreciated more)

7. I plan on making many sites. I already own 12 domains. I've been reading about a MultiSite Module. Tempting. But I see nothing but geek speak in the group I joined that discusses it. It's almost all over my head. I suspect it would be the best approach for my ultimate needs, and I prefer to get things right the first time, but I'm solidly sure I will be lost in the tech speak and screw one thing up after the other. Maybe it would be better to start out doing all this the wrong way and then attempting to migrate data later. But is it possible to migrate from many sites to a single multisite?

OK, I'll stop there. You understand it'a all about getting started. I will say that I have never been spoken down to since I've been here. And that most of my posts have received replies fairly quickly. But then, I've been very cautious, probably too cautious.

My intent here is not to wane philosophical on the question of whether to have an Absolute Beginners Forum. Neither is it to point out, that probably there are many beginners like me, who basically just need to get started and have to weigh out conflicting information that appears to be in the forums, many threads being old, and not really able to ask good questions, because they haven't yet even gone so far as intalling the software to see how it works. It is all in an abstract and imaginary world for them until they actually do it.

All of that is true. But what I really just want is a simple answer to the seven issues above.

So if you would be so kind, if there is anyone out there who has any really good advice about my precise problems, could they please give me their opinion? Is there anyone out there with experience who can answer the above questions? Wow, would that be a help!!

James
Newbie here. Really all I want is to make fast web sites mostly, but with some power features and have the ability to customize, not just design, but processes, such as eCommerce features, and subscription based user levels.

=-=

vm commented 3 April 2008 at 02:36

1. Whether you choose Drupal 6 or Drupal 5 is up to you. No one can answer this question for you specifically. There are still some modules that are being worked on that need to catch up to the changes made in D6 core.

2. 5.3 is an insecure build. 5.7 is the latest, most secure release of the Drupal 5.x series. That said, drupal.org documentation discusses dev sites on your local machine here: http://drupal.org/node/147786 I've never heard the package you reference. With that specific package I can't be much help. I don't perticularily like one click installs provided by a 3rd party.

3. see the link in #2

4. to take a site from your dev to live server =
on dev server:
clear cache tables in DB
clear watchdog table in DB
clear sessions table in DB
export DB

on live server:
import DB
upload files
alter setting.php file. using $db_url to point to live DB

5. The dreamweaver extension was never released. As to whys, the developer would have to answer that. Personally, I think it was a bit of a big poject. Intentions were in the right place I'm sure, but in the end it may have been a situation where a single person bit off a little more than they could chew.

6. Samba has nothing to do with Drupal. Without knowing what thread you got this information from, so as to know the context, it's a bit hard to help here.

7. Drupal core provides multisite capability out of the box. I've used the method in the past and found it "neat" but in the end felt there was no overrwhelming need to run more then one installation on a single code base beyond that of my dev site and live site in subdomains on the same server.

your questions could have been asked in the pre installation forum rather than attached to a thread that really has nothing to do with the questions themselves. By asking them in this thread they are essentially buried an new users with the same questions won't find them.

all forums are for new users as well as elder users.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

Thanks - anyone else?

jamescarvin commented 3 April 2008 at 09:31

Thank you for answering my questions.

VeryMisunderstood said:

your questions could have been asked in the pre installation forum rather than attached to a thread that really has nothing to do with the questions themselves. By asking them in this thread they are essentially buried and new users with the same questions won't find them.

So apparently there would have been a better forum. Of course, as I've explained I've been searching through forums for about two weeks now. Still didn't figure out the right spot for my question. This certainly highlights the need for better forum organization/search capabilities. And in fact, I just searched on "pre installation" and did not find it. And then I searched the main Forum and did not see it. And also the Documentation link and did not find it there. So if you have a reference, it would be most appreciated!

1. On D5 vs D6, no one can decide for me, but how as a beginner am I supposed to make the right decision? This probably sounds stupid to someone who knows, but I've been looking and not found it. Is there a working modules description forum? I found one for module ideas, but not one that describes what's already developed. I also don't know how to add them on once I find them.
A forum like that would help me answer that question for myself from a beginner's vantage point.

2. The forum I was looking at was http://drupal.org/node/120613 - which also mentions the Setting up a Developer Environment Forum, but immediately after suggests DevSide.net and links to a Web Developer Page - http://drupal.org/node/195238, that in turn speaks of a 5.3 Drupal release that comes with Web Developer Suite. It's the first thing that is there.

Well, especially if double installs create failures, I don't want to get bad info. And it's at the very beginning that the right info seems to count most.

I found the link by clicking on "Documentation" on the main tab. It is under the Drupal Cookbook for Beginners: "A. Getting Started

It's old, apparently, yet it is right where the site intuitively led me, as a beginner - leading ultimately to my double install which, in turn led me to uninstalling and asking what the latest and best skinny on development environments is - so I didn't make the same mistake twice.

Thank you again for your help. I'll track this thread. And if anyone else has any thoughts on how to get started, please chime in.

=-=

vm commented 3 April 2008 at 12:29

my apologies, the forums have been going through some renaming, pre installation is now "before you start" see: http://drupal.org/forum. Your questions though could have also easily been placed in general discussion. Thats not to say that you've placed them in an incorrect or wrong forum. I merely stated that rather than attached to this thread, you could have started your own dicussion or multiple if you wanted to break out your questions into seperate threads which is a benefit for multiple reasons to "other new users" who use the search as you have.

may want to have a read of this : Tips for posting to the Drupal forums

IMHO what this "highlights" is that there is no "wrong" forum more so than a need for "more" forums. There are a handful of forums that have been deprecated which has made the forum list that much smaller. If necessary just choose one if you are that confused. If its in a "wrong" forum then it can be moved by a site mainatiner if necessary. Though I've never seen a question not get an answer because it could have been in a "better" forum.

With regards to searching for documentation, information and tutorials always remember that google is very happy with Drupal. As such you can find a plethora of info using it to help narrow your searches as well.

Most every module in drupal comes with a README.txt and an INSTALL.txt file included in the download. Installing modules is a simple task that requires you to upload the downloaded, untarred module folder to your sites/al/modules folder, goto administer -> modules and enable it. If the modules you want to use have D6 versions, then by all means use D6. If you are going to use a module that hasn't been ported yet use D5 or help port the module to D6 so that it can be used by yourself and the community at large. There is no right or wrong decision here. The decision is based on what you are planning on developing and whether or not the contributed modules (if any) are already ported to the newest version of Drupal core.

as far as module status for D6 see: http://groups.drupal.org/node/5036 (found using google)

as far as that tutorial is concerned, that is what the user who wrote that documentation used. I use WAMP. Ultimatley you can use any stack you want so long as it includes the compatible software Drupal needs see: http://drupal.org/requirements Keep in mind that these types of questions aren't really drupal related. When you create a development environment on your local machine you are getting experience as a systems administrator. This doesn't mean you can't ask dev environment questions here though some questions specific to a specific stack package may be answered faster in the forum of the package you choose to use.

I have multiple installs inside my sandbox, so I'm not quite sure what you mean when you state "failure". being more verbose on the word "failure" would be a benefit.

_____________________________________________________________________
My posts & comments are usually dripping with sarcasm.
If you ask nicely I'll give you a towel : )

Need a good Knowledge Base!

Bobuido commented 3 April 2008 at 14:27

It seems to be yet another example of information over load

@James
I don't mind running through some questions - I'll answer what I can

If you have no problem with me publishing them (as knowledge base articles) that is :)

You can contact me through my profile here

@everybody
I'm looking to build a knowledge base with Drupal, for Drupal that if successful, can be offered up to other FOSS projects

Open source supporting open source - Wouldn't it be wonderful :)

There's a Drupal / Wiki (from the installation profiles) set up here
http://digital006.com/drupalKB/wiki/main_page

We are looking to discuss and build a KB (later an installation profile?) with Drupal

If you have any ideas / time they would be more than welcome

Current (Main) Project: http://www.takraw-association.org.uk

This Newbie Has No Shame

jamescarvin commented 4 April 2008 at 02:57

Thanks for the offer, @Bob!

As I mentioned in my private message to you, you may use any of my newbie tech troubleshooting for the knowledge base. I'm not proud :P Happy to be a guinea pig. When I'm done I'll probably be able to write a manual, only every day of my learning curve is one more day I'm behind in my projects. I could sure use some help moving all this along.

By the way, I finally did get 5.7 on for development at home and 6.1 is up on a server causing all kinds of headaches. Glad I opted for the 5.7, I think - for now.

Question 1: the 5.7 install was to localhost, which was at C:\www\vhosts\localhost\node

I really don't get how I can create more than one drupal site at a time now that I have this installed. And when I create an admin for drupal I had to use mysql as the database name. It wouldn't accept anything else, and also had to have the user name and password that was given to me by DevSide.Net's documentation. How do I create another site?

Questions 2: I had everything in html/css the way I liked it. Should I just copy my files over to the node location? The first thing I wanted to do was change the logo, which I finally figured out is done through themes/configure . What I'm not picturing yet is how this will later be loaded onto a server without screwing up all the file paths if I trace a local path to where I currently keep my web site files stored. So my question is, should I copy all of the files over to my drupal folder or something?

I'm running Win XP. SP2. And wishing there was someone out there to instant message or chat with in a classroom like setting - like a 24/7 moderator help volunteer staff that handled 1-to-many newbie questions (they have those in heaven).

...

sepeck commented 4 April 2008 at 03:16

1. Yes, it can be done. Don;t worry about it at this point. Learn Drupal first.
2. See theme guide in documentation tab.

3. Start a new thread please.

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain}

-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
_{Drupal Best Practices Guide}

Can we have a forum called "absolute beginners"?

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