You reply was very helpful - its a very easy system to use once you get it.
Printable View
You reply was very helpful - its a very easy system to use once you get it.
Good idea.Quote:
Originally Posted by vimto
Agreed.Quote:
The links above the wiki, We have the option of clicking on Wiki, or (List), when clicking on Wiki I have it set to take me to my self-created home page, but I don't like having the (List) option there, a user does not need to see this, most of my users will think it's a forum to post messages in and that defeats the object of having it there.
I would like to see here on VW, many and I mean many template variations with the output examples, including corners and tiny images implanted into the tables... that we could use on our wikis, ... err, cough, well you know for those of us who are 'challenged' :)
I also want to say that the support here at VaultWiki by especially Ted, (and of course others who can assist) is the best I have ever seen. Ted knows what he is doing. I don't know how he juggles thing? Amazing. I for one am very grateful.
I will see what I can do about getting more Templates created, but I don't really know what would be helpful. We can write some little docs explaining the Templates we do have, and how they can be used.
Thankfully, it's been a little easier for me to juggle everything recently since I have two more people helping me out (albeit only part time), and we're hoping to add another very soon. Right now it's myself doing a majority of the coding / support, with another person working on the docs, and another helping out debugging the code I write.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees and I imagine its only hurting your bottom line. If you have people not using this product or asking for their money back then you have a real problem. I would never, ever recommend this product to anyone as it stands right now. It sits basically unused on my Forums because nobody can figure out how to use it. I was planning to write a tutorial that explained how to use it but I can't figure out very basic aspects of it based on the documentation. (I suspect that I made a mistake early on which warped the structure of my WIKI and now I can't figure how to fix it. )Quote:
Originally Posted by jawatkin
Whats frustrating to me is that you've been sent a clear message that your clients are having trouble using this program yet you've failed to create even a simple demo project - something that I imagine could be done very quickly ( a couple of hours). Simply a word document walking someone through the creation of a WIKI with books and everything would be so helpful.
Here we are three months later - you say you have more time now - and yet, unless I've missed something you've done nothing to address these issues. Clearly they're not a priority - my opinion is that you should make them a priority!
Since we are on the subject of documentation...
The problem with creating a "simple" demo tutorial is we can't include "everything" and it still be simple. Even if we did a series of video tutorials that show what to do to make an example wiki, to keep it simple, we'd have to end up recreating the current organization (or something very similar) of the manual in videos, and it would pretty much say the same things.
You mention creating a wiki with Books. As an example, is the following section of the documentation still very hard to understand? This has been written this way since at least June, when you made your initial comments about not understanding namespaces and we rewrote a substantial amount of the manual.
http://www.vaultwiki.org/books/Introduction-to-Books
Continuing to address documentation issues have not been a priority since June, because since we finished the manual rewrite, there really have not been any complaints figuring out how to use VaultWiki - except one case that was related to permissions not being set properly.
Instead we are attempting to address any future or unreported issues by tackling it directly in the way the software is designed. This is why you may have seen discussions sprinkled around the forum about a new version we'll be making over the next few months. We believe that making it easier to use is much of a higher priority than making duplicates of the existing documentation in different forms (video, PDF, etc), especially since they would all need to be re-done once the re-design+re-code is complete.
Video tutorials are actually a very good idea. My members would love video tutorials for end users and it would surely increase the use of Vaultwiki.
I'm prepared to help with any information or ideas being implemented as I get the time to do it. I've been with VW for a long time now, and get how most features work reasonably well.
Perhaps the solution might be to take a brand new user, and work our way through all their questions and then produce a community driven help wiki.
I understand the major issues that there are with writing manuals up on how things work, I can struggle that myself without someone giving me a clear question they want to answer.
So here's a suggestion on how this might be rectified.
We've got the Tutorials namespace here. How about a way of inputting content there, working our way through a development process, users contributing, and pegasus clarifying if we have any errors in it. It could be an idea for pegasus to work out a way of us being able to process/transfer the Tutorial into other wikis. i.e. when an upgrade comes through, it includes the option to install the Tutorial namespace, which would include an import of the Tutorials created here and their images, or if it's already installed, update it. That way each wiki community can benefit from an already existing and tried and tested help system, that is community driven, appropriate to what the Wiki is intended for in the first place.
This product is probably the best major extension of vBs capabilities outside Jelsoft and vBulletin IMO, and I would like it to be more widely available and used. If we as a community not only contribute financially but also by our collective knowledge and input, the product grows and gets better.
If pegasus is ok with this idea, we could start a Social Group that will become the focus on such a project, and we can collaborate from ground up on how we can start this off.
I've been waiting for a while now for the "Tutorial" namespace to start taking off. Please go ahead and do whatever you see fit to organize and fill it. As far as process/transfer of a whole namespace, this is something that's difficult because of naming conventions on sites that may or may not match, and something I'm not quite sure our servers can handle unless we perform some major hardware upgrades.
As far as providing self-contained Tutorial documents like a PDF or HTML compilation, this would be easier to accomplish, but such an export mechanism is not something we have planned until after 3.1.0 Gold. Development on this major sub-version is already under way, but we will likely not see a beta until at least a month after XenForo opens for business.
I'll see what I can do. My suggestions was not so much to integrate the data that exists, but with each software update include an xml import of that data into the wiki with the download, the xml being taken at the point of the software update and not after, unless you wanted to create a periodic update for it based on any changed content that might fall out of cycle. But the regular maintenance releases should be enough. If any new changes were incorporated before they went to public release, we could then add any additionally required content.
It would be extremely helpful to have a comprehensive set of articles and videos, that are solely directed at the end user.
Currently the documentation mixes admin stuff, moderator stuff with end user stuff. That is the best way to confuse end users I am afraid.
If its up here, then we can easily copy paste it into our knowledge base. Mind that I do not use the vbulletin FAQ. I use wiki instead.
Thanks for pointing that out. It actually shouldn't be too hard for us to create several books under the Documentation tab: install, admin, moderator, end-user. Most articles focus on one or the other, but the list is mixed because the pages are currently grouped by feature.
Some articles might have to be duplicated, (like the "Introduction" pages would still be useful to admins who might not know why they would even want to enable a feature, but would also be useful to end-users).
Will try to get this accomplished early in the week.
As a new customer, I'm really struggling with Namespaces and templates - I've been through the admin guide a few times and I really have no idea how I should be configuring this stuff!
- Better explain the relationship between forums and namespaces, using example structures. Should name spaces share forums? Can they? What impact do namespaces have on browsing from the end user perspective? What about the wiki authors?
- What are some of the ways to combine everything and display it in a nice fashion to the viewers?
- A video tutorial wouldn't be a bad idea... Showing a walk through of how to setup a wiki, and then use it. (Using all aspects of the system, not just a single page article. Something integrated and functional.)
- Inclusion of the vaultwiki manual as a starting point would be hugely beneficial. I would like to see how it is structured and setup. (forums, namespaces, source, ect)
- When my users click on the wiki link at the top, they have no idea what they are looking at. They just see a bunch of namespaces and interpret them as categories. This makes the wiki kind of strange and foreign to navigate for most website visitors.
- After reading through your manual I now have more questions than I did originally when I first visited it. It is very helpful, but it fails to elaborate on purpose and functionality on the administrative side. It defines parts of the system without giving any real world examples or possible uses. Currently it is like handing someone a saw and telling them it's for cutting, but without showing them how to cut or what to cut. If they happen to figure out how to cut on their own, they still may have no idea what they should be cutting and for what purpose. (Obviously this is an analogy, and hopefully someone would not struggle that much with a saw.)
- Tell us what we should be doing, and why we are doing it.
A namespace is a group of forums
Namespace A
-- Forum A
-- Forum B
-- Forum C
Namespace B
-- Forum D
-- Forum E
-- Forum F
You need at least one forum-group (namespace). They should not share forums. You can assign different namespaces functions (like book, images, templates) and the functions don't stack, so sharing forums could lead to problems.
Some namespaces won't affect end-user experience except by what they see in the URL. URLs are structured with ?title=namespace-title:article-title
But if you give the namespace additional functionality, like use the setting to make all pages in that namespace into books, then that would affect the end-user experience because end-users would experience the pages as books.