Help us, help you

Hi James. This is great to see. Wish I’d have been able to make it to EEConf but, wrong hemisphere…

From my point of view I’d like to see ‘did you know you can do this’ type material. A lot is left to work out for yourself and even though I’ve been working with EE for 5 years, I’m pretty sure I’m just scratching the surface. Full tutorials on things like template routing, performance optimisation etc wouldn’t go amiss along with code examples. Ryan Masuga’s EE guide is the kind of practical setup advice that Im talking about.

I know it’s probably tricky but it also wouldn’t hurt to se Ellis explore some of the more powerful & well-used addons and what they can really do. Again Impretty sure Im not really using EE remotely to its potential.

Marketing & promotional materials would also be great. We’re in a constant battle against WP & themes and it would be great to see some slick white-label materials which can be incorporated into proposals or videos which can be worked into our own site. Campaign Monitor are great at this kind of thing as a reference.

Anyway, greetings from Brisbane and cheers for kicking this off.

Thanks for opening up this discussion!

One thought that came to mind when we were discussing the community is maybe you could do some sort of customer onboarding email series after a first license purchase, introducing new customers to the various sources of information and community for ExpressionEngine.

Don’t know if this fits here, but what bugs me is the very fragmented help/support community. Years ago, there was the EllisLab Discussion Forum (this one) and everything was fine ‘cause all where here and you could find help fast and provide help for otheres. Now, there is eecms-Stack-Exchange, there is the Slack-Channel, there is the devot-ee-Forums and there is this forum here. All with its benefits, and with all its disadvantages. Slack for example is surely great — if you catch the right time and people … otherwhise your question/issue gets lost in the shuffle. And previously discussed issues will never be found again (no archive, no really good search …). The Stack Exchange Channel is great, but could be easily swaped out with a good Discussion Forum. Great would be one ressource, one platform to get and provide fast and splendit community support. «As it used to be» with the old EE-Forum 😉 It does not have to be this forum — it could, but does not have to be … just re-centralized as before 😉 I guess this won’t even interfere with the new paid support subscriptions. But would be a great benefit for the community.

One question I regularly get from prospective clients when pitching for work is about after sales support - i.e. if we build the site and drop off the planet afterwards how easy would it be for them to find another EE developer to take over the reigns. While we intend being around for many years yet clients like to be reassured that their investment is safe. We have the Pro network of course but this would need a high profile in any promotional material.

Another one, we often get asked if we can build a site that does XYZ, and while we know we can do it in EE we don’t actually have a live working site with similar features to show them. It would be good to have an extended case studies place where we can show clients EE doing all sorts of magical things.

Stefan, for my part, I think we should really consolidate in two places: Slack and these here forums. Slack and the forums are both official offerings from EllisLab — and I have it on good authority that improvements are coming for the forums very soon.

I think one of the things about the forums that is weird is that forums are somewhat old technology and the general concept is looked down on a lot nowadays. But they do have the benefit of being searchable and have more permanence and foster better discussion of specific issues.

I also really like the conversational aspect of Slack and I love how I can have a conversation and real time debugging directly with people. For some things, I think perhaps we can get better at posting a question in the forums, and if real time collab happens in Slack, we can follow up here for the permanence and search-ability.

One of the things I came away with in our discussions at EE conf is that I want to get much better about being present in the forums because a lot of people “on the outside” are more likely to look here for action and a sense of community. And one thing we all agreed on at EE conf is we want to revitalize the community. We have a small but thriving camaraderie in Slack and we want to see that grow.

Hi All,

This is a great start, lots of good suggestions and discussion happening! Please keep it going. We’re reading everything. I’m on vacation until Monday after next so I won’t be active int he discussion until then, but when i get back I’ll make sure to get caught up on this thread and replay as needed.

Thanks again for helping us, help you!

…for my part, I think we should really consolidate in two places: Slack and these here forums. Slack and the forums are both official offerings from EllisLab — and I have it on good authority that improvements are coming for the forums very soon.

I totally agree with this. Official forums are (still) where many people look, either as someone investigating EE for the first time, or to solve problems, which many of us enjoy helping with. EE at Stack Exchange is of course a valuable resource, but a 3rd party one.

If nothing else the forums should be active and give a good professional impression to everyone.

Another thought that crossed my mind, and one I miss, was the old wiki. That was full of useful information. Do we need something similar again?

regarding the forums and old technology, I think something like what Muut has is where the forums need to go. https://muut.com/blog/release/slack-integration.html Can’t say I ever used it, but the first thing I thought about was some integration between the two, and there you go. That way we can have general conversation/quick replies in the forum, then we can be notified of new forum post in a specific channel with quick access to reply to the posts. Brilliance and ease of slack + longevity and storage of the forum. anybody up for seeing if we can do this?

git commit -m"When applied, this commit will - fix the forum/Slack relationship"

I think the EE website would be helpful if it had the following sections packed with resources:

FEATURES

• End-client-centric features with videos. Lead with quick intro video showing important parts of the control panel that EE devs can send clients to. I just had a call yesterday of someone asking to see the control panel to compare it with WP and Craft. This would have been perfect.

• Developer-centric features.

LEARN

• Tutorials: Free video tutorials from the EE community and EllisLab

• Copy and Paste: Section of complete code snippets and “do it this way” type of help aimed at beginners. Allow comments so people can show an alternate way.

• Docs: Stop calling it the User Guide. No one wants to read a user guide, we want documentation. 😊

• Classes: Online, video classes, free or paid, led by an EE dev or EllisLab.

COMMUNITY

• Forums: front and center

• Local Events/Meetups: listing of these (maybe even cross-post free online classes)

• Pro Network: I think it’s high time to update who is still active in this group so that those of us who are still active don’t get lost among others who no longer are.

• Highlight EE Conf year round in some callout

• EE-related websites.

• Other: Slack, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

GET HELP

• Search: returns results from docs, tutorials, and copy and paste sections (not forums).

• Job postings: focus on “Hire a developer”

• Official Support

• Forums, Stack Exchange, Slack, and other ways

The Blog section needs to be improved too. Right now most of the recent posts are simply release announcements. Change the name from Blog to News and have categories, such as, Releases, Announcements, Notes/Articles, etc.

Those are my thoughts.

tl;dr - Focus primarily on convincing/persuading end-clients (because we’ll link to those resources in our sales pitches) and providing tools for new EE devs to learn quickly (the right way).

COMMUNITY - Forums: front and center

I think this would be very helpful. I noticed that yesterday that every time I go to ellislab.com I have to click around to stumble into the community. Of course I just setup a bookmark now, but for new users they can head straight there.

Another thought that occurred to me for the community, is to devote a block of time each day or every other day or something to commit to the Fourms. It’s going to take an effort from both EllisLab and the community to make EE a “popular” cms. At least for a while, each of us could commit to 30m or whatever at set intervals of our choosing to spend time reading through latest posts, trying to answer even if we don’t have “the answer”, etc. Something like this would greatly help everyone out as well as show the EE team that it’s worth investing the in the forums.

Forums: front and center

I would say, Community front and center in general. But probably call it something other than community. I visit the forums through a bookmark because I never remember how to find it and nothing on the EL website says “hey, go here to be a part of something cool”.

Don’t hide the Slack channel. I mean, most people will find it eventually, but its existence is not exactly advertised.

I agree with a lot of the suggestions, especially echo much said by Stephen Callender above.

There needs to be learning resources right on the site, beyond the docs and forums. It’s too hard for many new people to find some of these resources on the web, especially since tutorials and books out there are still only for EE2. When a dev is researching a new product, they want to see some examples under the hood as easily as possible. When I learned years ago, if was the Mijingo webcasts that made it click. Before that, I was lost in changing my way of thinking to EE, coming from page based CMSs. However, those are now outdated, and Michael Boyink is also out of the EE game. EL needs to produce or partner to reproduce similar tools for EE3 available right here.

Some good stuff posted so far. Here are a few quick ideas, some similar to ideas above.

• refresher blog posts, tutorials, etc. with new/old features of the CMS. I forget about new features often if I read about them initially, but don’t implement them right away.

• Real-world examples of features. Sometimes just looking at tags and variables in the docs isn’t enough to tell me “this will solve this issue you are having”, or “this will make doing this easier”.

• more people need to visit the forums to get/give support(including me)

• Ellislab employees and/or other EE experts should post helpful blog posts to third-party sites, Smashing Magazine, for example. This will help attract new users.

EDIT: holy crap, I joined these forums in 2009.