SUPPORT OPTIONS IN DRUPAL SEEM TO BE LACKING

http://www.robcottingham.ca/20060327/coming-soon-two-drupal-book-reviews/

1) Don't use caps. It is considered shouting, rude and obnoxious.
2) You can always pay a consultant to help you out. There are plenty to be found.

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If you have a problem, please search before posting a question.

I'm also a drupal newcomer, trying to convert an existing website onto drupal.

I've had a radically different experience from the original poster; questions are answered within minutes! with insightful answers, and even though the taxonomy system was initially difficult to understand, there are tons of pages of documentation illustrating how taxonomies can be different from or similar to simple categories used in other CMS's.

I'd like to congratulate the drupal community for one more convert (ME!), and I realise that there are so many of these "help me now" posts that the locals have become a bit jaded (ie don't bother answering ...). That's a concern to me, but it hasn't affected me yet.

To the original poster, the competitiveness of Drupal is not necessarily the same as handholding customers (even just a bit). Sometimes it can get rough as your questions get brushed off, but think of it this way: all opensouce projects have limits in resources. Some projects spend much time helping newbies, writing tutorials, etc, but the drupal community is less inclined to do so, not because they don't want to, but maybe because they don't know how to (ie. you need talent to write good, understandable documentation!) or they don't have enough time.

Drupal is extremely competitive in the CMS market. It just chooses to allocate its resources to the things it's good at: writing kickass code for highly scalable and flexible content management.

but have you looked at http://www.drupal.org/handbooks

It covers more than what is needed to set up any simple site and gives pointers towards advanced usage.

If you are looking for something more than just a simple site, you ve two options: A) learn to do it yourself (thats what I did) via the documentation that exists and the 'open' source code that is available, or B) Hire a developer.

I'm definitely not trying to turn anyone away here. I haven't seen your questions in the forums, and there are no links to them here. I do know for a fact that the drupal community is a VERY helpful bunch and give whatever aid they can.

If you truly think there is some grandiose plot to drive drupal consultants demand up via skimping on the documentation, then you are mistaken..

"Many people can write and contribuate to the Drupal solution. While many of us cannot and do not want to. We are the customers."

Anyone can contribute. Period. There is no can't, at the very least you could go onto the forums and help people who are just beginning cross the same hurdles you are dealing with. You could confirm reported bugs, just by installing modules. You could *gasp* write documentation for the things you do understand. Or you could hre a developer and return the result back to drupal - sponsored by you. But if you think that we are here to serve in any customer service related manner - you are mistaken. Hire me - then you can be the customer. Otherwise, roll up your sleeves and help yourself, or ask a specific question. The code is open.

I think, for the most part, the support for drupal is great. I have had simple questions answered within an hour or so on the forums. This is great, and helped me get something workable up and running right away. I am extremely new to website development and chose drupal from the customizability I saw. I have, however, had difficulty finding solutions to questions that tend to run off the beaten path. Some modules provided, for example, provide close to the functionality I am looking for, but not all. Some posts I make go unanswered. Is this bad? I dont think so, since its not the core of drupal, people might not be as familiar with it or inclined to take the time to even search these posts out.

All in alll, I love drupal and plan on creating more content with it. Who knows, maybe someday I will be able to answer questions in a knowledgeable manner as well. :)

Mike of Sighing Sage

We are the customers. It's an insult to tell a customer to just go "write your own solution".

Let's make one thing clear: you are not a customer. If your question goes unanswered or isn't anwered to your satisfaction; too bad. There are multiple reasons why some questions go unanswered but it's all we can do with free, voluntary support.

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Tips for posting to the forums.
When your problem is solved, please post a follow-up to the thread you started.

I think your assumptions are wrong. You make assumptions about Drupal as if it were made by a company. A company that seeks to generate revenue and to outcompete any similar companies.
This is not the case. Drupal developers do develop Drupal for their own personal gain, but there is no steering comittee of any kind. So basically you can use our code, bu if you don't get the support you need, it isn't our problem.
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Drupal services
My Drupal services

This is probably not the place for "We are the customers." There may be some community projects that are positioned along your views on customer support, but my understanding of the Drupal community philosophy is a little different. While certainly people do often contribute support in the forums, develop documentation, fix bugs that are problem for others, the orientation here is more toward building a community of contributors and collaborators that work together to create a product, not supporting customers looking for free support and documentation. I used this analogy before, but I think it's worth saying again. To borrow from John F. Kennedy, the prevailing philosophy is "Ask not what Drupal can do for you; ask what you can do for Drupal." This is not a bad project management philosophy because it leaves people a lot of freedom to do what they want because there is minimal bureaucratic overhead and encourages participation, but it does not offer the solution you are looking for. Instead, Drupal is about working together first and foremost, not about providing free services.

Now this doesn't mean that there haven't been discussions and interest about creating documentation of the type you describe. Certainly, people have been (and will continue to be) encouraged to do so. But if it's done, it won't be because of an orientation toward satisfying customer demands.

www.drupalecommerce.com is for beginners and intermediate users
Our most popular section is the one on example sites and recipes. We are building this up.

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Drupal ecommerce

see http://www.drupalecommerce.com/47vs46 to read
"What are the main differences between 4.7 and 4.6?"

I'm also relatively new to drupal... waiting release of 4.7 and CCK to start working with it.

I think you CAN'T expect support from a free open source project like this, like you would expect from a company. No one has any obligation to answer your questions, so sometimes you will get great answer from the community, sometime you will never get your post anwered. It is like a lottery.

This is how it works with open source free project. It is up to you to decide if you want to use a software built in such a way.

Personally, I think Drupal is worth the try, but i'm not 100% convinced (yet).

Cordially,
Brakkar

And I have great news: if you are not satisfied with Drupal, you are entitled to a full refund. If you yell even more, you can get back twice what they paid for it! You are on the good road.
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My developer blog. | The news is Now Public | Ask not what Drupal can do for you -- ask what you can do for Drupal.

This is a common problem with people who don't understand how open source works. "Customers" don't participate in these discussions, peers do. And, as with any peer group, reciprocity is the basis for the exchange.

What do I mean? Well, in any vendor-customer relationship, the basis of the exchange is the amount of cash/goods that changes hands. In the open-source world, the currency is ideas, not cash. So, if you want to get, you gotta give.

If you don't like the end-user or beginner documentation, jump right in and help rewrite the documentation so that it addresses questions like the one's you are having. But first, learn about the people you are working/interacting with. This is a rich community of cluebies, newbies, duffers, novices, and experts, many of whom don't speak English very well.

This is a self-organizing community and there's lots of room for good ideas and suggestions. But there is little room for demands. Everyone's here because they chose to be here, not because they were promised a level of service, quality or specific kind of code. Drupal exists in a rich environment of competing CMS paradigms. Many of us who have worked with proprietary and commercial systems understand what has been built here and gladly trade off a level of uncertainty and confusion for what we get in return. If you aren't willing to make that trade-off, Drupal, and for that matter, most other open-source CMS frameworks probably aren't the right fit for the challenge you are trying to address.

With that said, there ARE developers here who are willing to provide handholding for a fee. Hire one if you really like the idea of Drupal, don't have the time to read what you need to read in order to figure it out, and really want to jumpstart your use of it.

Good luck!

Dear customer,

For your information: Drupal is Open Source. Which means, it's free. Therefore, you pay nothing. Now, if you pay nothing, you better expect nothing. Because then, all you will ever get becomes suddenly much more than you expected! Isn't that great?

You want to know my opinion? Drupal offers a lot. A whole lot, for nothing.

No shop in the world can conform to that...

___________________
discover new oceans
lose sight of the shore

At www.drupalecommerce.com, we've decided to write documentation for the beginner and intermediate Drupal users. This will help take Drupal to the next level.

Drupal documentation is written for programmers or people who can read code, by and large. Here is a great example. Merlinofchaos, who has written the highly acclaimed new views module, has written documentation for it, which is here:
http://drupal.org/node/54432

However, if we were to use the terminology of recipes, this is only the list of ingredients.
beef stir-fry.

1 green onion
2 pieces of beef
3 red peppers
some soy sauce
Okay. That's fine if you know what to do next because you've made chicken stir-fries. But if you don't know anything about stir-fries, you are not going to know what to do next.

what the documentation does not do is say
1) cut the onion and beef into half inch pieces
2) put 2 tablespoons of oil in the pan
3) turn the heat up to high
etc, etc.

Now it makes sense the the documentation is written this way because
A) programmers are very busy writing code and don't have time to write documentation
B) programmers think like programmers, not like end users who know nothing about Drupal or programming.

We think it's great that merlin took the time to write so much documentation for views, which is much more documentation than there is usually.

Now what we are starting to do at www.drupalecommerce.com is to provide the list of steps.

For example, here we've begun writing a tutorial for the views module:
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/node/323

we hope to eventually to do this for all the important and non-obvious modules.

That section is not finished, so you may get more out of this page:
What are the main differences between 4.7 and 4.6?
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/47vs46

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Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site designed to answer the questions of Drupal beginners and intermediate users. It is in a very early stage, but it does have about 300 pages. Quick links to "Modules," and "Example Sites."

hi everyone,

Cel, thank you for all the time you put into leading the documentation effort before sepeck. Leading documentation for open source software seems like one of the really import and most under-appreciated jobs we can imagine.

We've seen enough long discussions on drupal.org to not want to get bogged down in it. It seems like someone could spend a lot of time trying to persuade the Drupal team to do something, and have it possibly never happen. Or just go and do it.

For example, you go to Drupal.org. What's the most prominent link on the right?
It's download the latest release. Now someone is fairly knowledgeable if they know how to download and install Drupal. They are not the beginner who has never seen a line of php code. This is the entire feel of drupal.org. We don't see it changing. We think maybe that's what is right for Drupal.org

To write documentation on drupal.org means to get things approved and persuade sepeck and heine and cel and amazon, etc, etc. It means a lot of time invested in persuading people that could see nothing ever result. For example, we could try to persuade Dries to put a "New to Drupal" button at the top of drupal.org. If he decides not to, all the time spent putting into persuading is gone. Whereas if we take the time and write down documentation, then there is something finished.

We also find that we like being able to edit posts over and over again, to have the flexibility to do what makes sense to use, without getting approval from someone.

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Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site designed to answer the questions of Drupal beginners and intermediate users. It is in a very early stage, but it does have about 300 pages. Quick links to "Modules," and "Example Sites."

Another difference: drupalecommerce.com has unfinished pages. For example, activeselect sounded like a very exciting new module, so we made a page for it.
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/node/332

There are simply no pages like that in the handbook. And we don't imagine there being any. It may very well be that there shouldn't be any pages like that in the handbook, which may want to have a more finished feel. We wanted to have a site where we can have the information in a way that's easy to find.

What we thought needed to be done to make documentation accessible to newcomers cannot be fixed by simply submitting a pages. We would completely reorganize the handbook. It's very difficult for a newcomer to find information in the handbook because it's not organized the way a newcomer thinks.

Here's an example. A newcomer wants to change the footer. Where do you look?
No idea.
okay. search on Drupal. search on Google. both give you this.
http://drupal.org/node/8042

what section is this in?
customization and theming
theme developer's guide
xtemplate theme engine.

you are a newcomer. you have no idea what a theme is. never heard of a xtemplate. is a developer a programmer or is it different?

There was a great quote by someone saying by the time you figure out how the handbook works, you have forgotten why it was so confusing when you started. Now getting the documentation team to completely reorganize the handbook is not going to happen, or if it ever does, would be after a tremendous amount of persuading.

We apologize if it seems we have provided any misinformation. That was not the intention. We officially encourage everyone to contribute to drupal.org documentation if you want to. Repeat: we encourage everyone to contribute to drupal.org documentation if you want to.

Linda
speaking for Linda, Marie, and anyone else who doesn't mind being here (Which thread was it? someone wrote a post and said something about ducking under the table?)

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Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site designed to answer the questions of Drupal beginners and intermediate users. It is in a very early stage, but it does have about 300 pages. Quick links to "Modules," and "Example Sites."

we have websites to make. we have to figure out the best modules to use. we want to keep track of bugs/problems we want to steer clear of. we have to organize the notes in a way that's easy to find. we have to keep track of how we do something, so that we can remember how to do it when we make a similar website. in order to keep track of these notes, we elected to use the cms called Drupal. to organize these notes in categories that make sense to us that we can find them, we have to do it on a separate site. because we are most interested in ecommerce sites, we are paying special attention to information pertaining to ecommerce and Drupal.

We thought we might as well open it up to the public, so that the documentation team does not have to answer the same question over and over and over and over again, to make their lives easier.

we encourage everyone to contribute to drupal.org documentation
we encourage everyone to contribute to drupal.org documentation

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Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site designed to answer the questions of Drupal beginners and intermediate users. It is in a very early stage, but it does have about 300 pages. Quick links to "Modules," and "Example Sites."

I have been with drupal for almost 18 months now and I can assure you that the documentation is not intentionally skimpy to drive users to the consultants. Yes, some consultants I approached quoted prices that sent me scurrying for cover, but it is their prerogative and the ultimate decision to hire them is mine, so I always have the choice, after all.

That said, I agree with you about the absence of tutorials that tie things together for non-tech kind of people. But, even this is starting to happen. Just today, merlinofchaos posted a brief, but very useful article about modules that can be used for a publishing scenario. Another recent one that similarly tied things together was Zacker's screencast about Organic Groups. And, the folks at lullabot.com have been regularly publishing podcasts of various things drupal. Yet another is the www.cookingwithdrupal.org site that has a few recipes that tie things together.

So, as you can see, there are efforts all over the place and many/all of these will ultimately (Edit: hopefully) end up in the drupal.org handbooks. I and other users can tell you how dramatically the handbook section of drupal.org has improved in recent times.

Ramdak, thank you for your support. We do appreciate it.

Sepeck,
There was never any attention to attack you or anyone else. We apologize if you or anyone else felt attacked. We think you are terrific and that you are doing great under challenging circumstances of high demand and low resources. (We felt attacked, but we'll try to write this off to a misunderstanding on the part of people who are all well-intentioned.)

Someone on the developers mailing list has offered to donate money. That person has been pointed in a variety of directions. Perhaps you can write to the person (or coordinate with Dries) to have some of the money go toward documentation.

It seems like the discussion is headed in a productive direction so we won't write anything else that could be misunderstood.

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Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site written using language that Drupal beginners and intermediate users can understand. It is in a very early stage, but it does have about 300 unfinished pages. Quick links to "Modules," and "Example Sites."

I have been using Drupal for only 3 months. I entirely agree that it is a bit tough for a newbie and I had my whinge about that. On the one hand I think it is fair and reasonable that a bunch of techies collaborating on some code should not feel obligated to cater for a "customer" when they ask for and receive nothing. On the other hand, three points: (1) when you put something in the public domain you take on a moral obligation to those who adopt it and (2) when this much effort has been invested in something I for one would want to see it thrive and (3) some of those non-customers are sites who provide a public service (or *shudder* actually make someone a living) so Drupal matters, it isn't just a fun hobby any more.

So that's my view of the big picture. On this particular issue, I had some suggestions of my own re the documentation and i found Steve and co open to my views and all too eager to adopt my humble initial contribution. I do however sense in the Drupal community the disinterest in non-technical or newbie users (except for the excellent work Heine and co do in the forums but that is kinda picking up the pieces afterwards not addressing the problem). E.g. I recently ranted against the anti-IE mindset some have.

I think some of the broader disconnect stems from new-user expectations. I thought it would be a few days to set up my Drupal site. There goes that Windows-user setup.exe mindset. It has been a couple of months now working 12-16 hour days and I'm finally about to test a live site. i had to learn it all (what's PHP?) so it took a while but I am technical enough to have coped (with lots of help from the forums).
I sold commercial software for 20 years and I am building my new business in open source. Why? because i think the support I get is superior: faster and more helpful and unconstrained by liability and other corporate BS. And if support can't help me, i can get the bonnet up and look for myself and fix it in the source. And the result is EXACTLY what I want because i built it. If I buy a package there is compromise everywhere and never 100% fit to requirements.
I understand now that the price i pay for that is the climb of the learning curve and the time I invest. Given the time i have invested i think Drupal has been several times more expensive than a Commercial Off-the-Shelf package but the result (and the fun along the way) justifies the investment. If i had understood from the start what i was getting into I would probably do it again, but I wish it had been explained to me. So new users need to understand:
# open source is hard - even if some projects might make it easier than Drupal does :-)
# open source requires you to learn everything
# you are a developer and a collaborator not a customer
# you better have the ability to learn and to cope with the technical material (if you dont, then buy COTS or pay a consultant)
In return you get something entirely different to a bought product.

And Drupal owners need to understand that new users are the lifeblood of the project, and the experience is overwhelming and a bit frightening for most, and a little more TLC wouldn't go amiss. I for one don't want to end up built on some back-water technology that no-one supports or contributes to any more. Drupal is one of the leaders right now - I hope it stays that way.
Also the amount of effort that has gone elsewhere shows that some fine tuning is needed in the culture to keep this thing together. As the community grows we risk alientating more groups if the culture doesn't grow to embrace the increasing diversity.

Focusing on the somewhat heated immediate issue, I'd say that having shown what can be done in the external site i hope we can all play nicely now and roll this stuff back into core just like the best modules. I feel the effort would be better invested in the home project and the last thing we need is a split.

I have to say that I have used a lot of GPL software in my day. I have just installed Drupal in the last week. Yes, the nodes and where to set what is pretty confusing. A simple road map would be nice. But, no one charged me a big fee when I downloaded it! The guys developing this software spend precious time doing it.

Sad to say, but updating documentation is usually at the bottom of the list of priorities for any GPL. Time gets taken up by development and security issues.

I, personally, have been able to find all the answers I need to my questions by using the Drupal search engine. Sometimes I find the answer promptly, sometimes it takes a little digging. And I am still confused by all the module setting, where they are, and what they do. But, I am sure, like any other comprehensive packaged I have worked with; I will get used to this one.

If you want good documentation, you can volunteer you time to that area of the project.

I am impressed with the ability to update and add functions so easily. Thanks to all that have worked, and are working, on this project!
Take Care, Sharon

The 2 tutorials for views have been submitted to drupal.org documentation.
http://drupal.org/node/47845
The original tutorials are here
http://www.drupalecommerce.com/node/141
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Drupal ecommerce, at www.drupalecommerce.com is a new site written using language that Drupal beginners and intermediate users can understand. It has about 300 unfinished pages. 2 tutorials for views module under "Modules"