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Started by Peter Duggan, March 18, 2004, 03:35:08 PM

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Peter Duggan

Since SMF has now been out in public beta form for just over a week, some users have started to find their way around it pretty quickly and others have admitted to being lost, a dedicated topic to keep you, the users, informed of progress on the documentation front and let you request the doc that you feel you need seems appropriate here.

Before we start on that, however, there are a few things that should be clarified right now:


  • This topic is for user help/manual type doc, as opposed to coding doc, which is being covered by [Unknown] at http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=7703.
  • While we recognise that the public beta was released with little of the doc that we'd really like to have included or otherwise made available, this was inevitable given the number of substantive changes made (literally) across the board during the closed beta phase. So, although we'll be doing our best to respond to your concerns and produce the doc that you need, we must also ask you to remember that we're still very much at the beta stage and it's not all going to be written and released overnight.
  • To keep this topic tidy and readable, please keep your posts here to genuine doc requests/discussion and not support issues requiring immediate attention (which *will* be moved to more appropriate locations).
  • Please contact us if you feel you have something to offer on the doc writing front and would like to be considered for membership of the new doc team.

So, as David stated less than 24 hours ago, some doc is already in the pipeline and much more has been discussed and planned:

Quote from: David on March 17, 2004, 11:01:53 PM
Documentation is a very important aspect of any software project.  We have already posted basic guides to installing and upgrading SMF and more are in the works.  We are trying very hard to compile excellent documentation for both all of you as administrators as well as your end users.  This process will however take time to fully complete.  While offering guides as posts is useful, we plan to offer multiple formats including flash tutorial movies.  Simple Machines' developers have also been great about documenting the code as they are working which should greatly help mod developers.

To which I might add that the user help (the stuff that belongs to the 'Help' button) is currently being rewritten and we started work on some trial Flash movies back in January, but couldn't progress too far down that route until crucial details of the interface and default theme started to take shape. That said, we're well aware that the doc needed extends to much more than just the user help that I'm working on now and the Flash tutorials that we hope to offer here in time, so I'll be sifting through the boards for posts I've seen requesting particular doc and invite you to start posting those doc requests here so we can all keep tabs on the whole situation from one convenient place.

Thanks for reading this, and please do respond as requested above.

Peter

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