The Joomla! Forum ™

I've been through all the documentation in the forums (yes, Anna's Tips and the FAQs as well). I've read the Quickstart from NetShine and Scotsman. I have read all the Joomla documentation. I bought the Joomla book. I now have all this information and convoluted explanations that just makes less and less sense the more I read.

Why isn't any of the Joomla documentation tutorial-based? People are calling them tutorials and using the word "tutorial" but still there are no STEPS explained...just explanations of what each part of Joomla does. 

Is there any place where, let's say, someone has put together the top 10 or 20 functions most users will do in setting up Joomla?  Like a simple 5-step explanation on setting up a newsfeed on the homepage (which I still can't get to work for the life of me)...Or a simple process for creating submenus?  Or the other things which I'm sure Joomla users are doing all the time?  Do these things exist????

Thank you.

_________________
Joomla Leadership Team
Author of Using Joomla from O'Reilly Media. | http://www.usingjoomlabook.com/
Creative Director, Kontent Design http://www.kontentdesign.com

I have always found this to be a useful page.
http://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread ... post202562

Some of the tutorials refer to Mambo. At this time Joomla! and Mambo are still close enough that the tutorials are still relevant.

Hope this helps.

-- r

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-- Joomla! Evangelist

The General Documentation team's mandate is to create the two reference manuals :  User Manual and Administrator manual, and take care of the Help Site.  We do not have the personal resources to provide more at this time.

Therefore, we encourage Joomla! community members to write complimentary tutorials especially for newbies.  Anyone who has written such tutorials please contact me as we would like to set up a Recommended Reading section of these third party tutorials on the Help site.

Thanks!

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Michelle Bisson, POPcliQ, http://www.popcliq.com
Joomla / OSM Trademarks Team Member

severdia,
get that top 10-20 functions list ready, if I like some item(s), I'll do it.

_________________
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. AE
http://joomla15.[URL banned].com for J! 1.5 screenshots
http://www.eyezberg.com

Try the quick start guide on the page below. Ive been having the same tutorial problem myself...................then I found this.

http://www.netshinesoftware.com/joomla-tutorial.html

sounds interesting
ill see if i can record a few basic ones

_________________
Backup, backup, backup!
The "Master" .htacess file by Nicholas http://snipt.net/nikosdion/the-master-htaccess

If you want to do a pdf or powerpoint i can quickly do a web presentation in flash or video formats for you  

Contact me at

http://impressionz.webhop.biz

Thats a lot of reading you've got there @severdia! I guess with all those readings, you have understood Joomla's capability--theoritically. And of course some administrative functions too.

To put your knowledge into practice where you can really say "I got it!", is a different story. As Albert Einstein once said "Imagination is much more important than knowledge" which same as you. I have the difficulty on putting together what I have read unless it is a tutorial based - step by step learning manual.

But that is not enough, because sometimes what we need is a complete case study. In my case maybe a complete makeover of a webisite so to practice the knowledge and test how we really have understood the subject matter.

At this time, what I would suggest is think on a website that you want. Let's make it a case study. We are not talking about Templating here. We are just talking about the basic Adminstration function.

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Day 12: while driving around with Red Barchetta (nightly) in the cyberstreets.

Hello SeVerdia;

As I am sure you are now painfully aware, your quest for documentation and tutorials for this particular application will be frustrating and will indeed continue well into the future.  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.   I must keep that in mind when it comes to the invisible Joomla! documentation. 

As far as I know, here is how the Joomla! folks think their documentation should be designed and laid out.  Must be true, they do it this way.

• The user's guide is a PDF file
• Tutorials and General How-To's are generally 3rd Party Documents (RedEvolution and Netshine are good)
• The Administrative Information is simple content using the Joomla! CMS (Which means it Cannot Be Downloaded)
• The Developer Information is again simple content using the Joomla! CMS (Which means it Cannot Be Downloaded)
• Forum Support  painful when you are searching the forum using real words and not some made up word, or mispelled word.

To be fair, let me explain.  On the one hand, the folks at Joomla! are developers and as developers they are very proud of their achievements as coders, developers, programmers and the like.  They know what you want before you know you want it.  They have done a great job at writing code especially given the fact the footprint of Joomla! is very small and the function is really very impressive.  I seldom find problematic code, only on 4 occasions have I found problems, but the forums did help albeit akin to finding a needle in the proverbial haystack.  So I made my changes and kept on moving along my particular path without any real pains, or cramping. 

As developers these folks are not going to help you by writing user documents and tutorials that describe the functions that they themselves designed and coded with a particular intention in mind.  Heck, that would make too much sense, but to be fair, it is a great deal of work.

In my opinion, the documentation sucks.  It is the project's greatest shortcoming from an enterprise perspective.  The lack of documentation keeps the project far behind other Open Source Portals, or CMS' such as Plone, just an example, not a recommendation.  Joomla! works.

If you read Michelle's post, you should have the clear picture. You ain't gonna get no more than what you got now.



If I can help you, please let me know.  If you want to know more about where I am coming from and what the core team really thinks, here is a link for ya.  http://forum.joomla.org/index.php/topic ... #msg313673

Best Regards, Allen 

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Maybe I will see you walking down the street soon. Hope you have been kind to me...

OOPs;

If you want to email me with a question, you can send me an email at joomla@allenquinn.net.  Make sure the SUBJECT starts off with Joomla so it does not find its way to the bit bucket.

Allen

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Maybe I will see you walking down the street soon. Hope you have been kind to me...

This is not stopping anyone from the community from writing quality tutorials.  If you have written some tutorials or plan to, please let me know.

We would love to develop our Recommended Reading section with tutorials from 3rd party authors on the Help Site.

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Michelle Bisson, POPcliQ, http://www.popcliq.com
Joomla / OSM Trademarks Team Member

Severdia -

You are in GOOD LUCK! Our core team member, Brad Baker, and forum administrator, recently opened - free to everyone - a great spot for tutorials, including Tutorials. it is at http://JoomlaTutorials.com . Thanks, Brad! Lots of great comments on this resource.

Allen - do you have submissions for the Joomla! documentation library? I know Manuman put a call out to the community a month, or so, ago, asking for work. You could just PM him and he can tell you how to share your material with the community. We appreciate the work people do for us. It's nice, too, because we don't have to be the hours people on a working team or the core team do in order to contribute a little! (Thanks, in advance, if you choose to help!)

Thanks Michelle and Manuman for hanging in there with us and doing all this work for all those years for no money! ( what are they thinking? ) And, again, Brad, thanks for providing all of the free resources and time and server, etc., for the community. ( what is he thinking? )

Not a bad core team! ...Amy

Hi Amy;

I plan to submit my documents to the community once I have finished them et'al.  I cannot give them up just yet as they are branded for my needs and many items do not apply solely to Joomla!.  This is due in large part to some major modifications I have made to the Joomla! administrative control panel.  I have integrated various 3rd party extensions and seperated many of the ADMIN tasks from what I feel are really USER tasks.

But, because I have some customers that are using a close to standard version of Joomla! I have some documents that simply need to be rebranded.

Here is what I am gonna do, I cannot give a date because I have not sized the workload.  When I can find the time, I will sanitize my documents and provide them to the project in a formal manner.  I expect to have this in mid February, but again, that is a cheap estimate, not a deadline.

Thanks, Allen

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Maybe I will see you walking down the street soon. Hope you have been kind to me...

Allen -

That is *awesome*! Thanks so much for your willingness to help the community in that way. I am new to open source and still a bit skeptical that a model that relies so much on volunteerism and sharing can work.

That is especially true when you consider the level of knowledge and training -- the professionalism -- we are asking people to share. So, for you to be willing to do that helps me believe this really can work.

I am also trying to finish some pieces to share, as well. The people on the documentation team have an enormous amount of work to do -- that many have done for years -- as well. It's difficult to take on more given the number of people who volunteer and are able to stick with it and the huge work load of just updating everything for the next release. You are also in the business, so, you now what upgrades can be like. In any event, they rely on others to also pitch in. And, I don't mind pitching in once in awhile, helps me feel like part of the gang (plus, it's my responsibility!)

I can't wait to see your contributions. When I get closer, I might tap you to do a read for me? (That is the thing about volunteering, people just ask for more!) If you have time, it would be great to have your perspective, as well.

Thanks, again, Allen!
Amy

AllenQuinn,

Thank you for considering to contribute your tutorials to the Doc project on Help.joomla.org.  We have a Recommended Reading section for this purpose.  All documentation from 3rd party Authors must be licenced Creative Commons.

Please get in touch with me when you are ready.

Thanks!

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Michelle Bisson, POPcliQ, http://www.popcliq.com
Joomla / OSM Trademarks Team Member

Hello Michelle;

NP, I do not have a problem using CC as the licensing mechanism.  It is a significant amount of work to strip out my proprietary information, but I have solicited the help of a colleague to speed things up for the community.  Hopefully mid October the document will be ready.

How should I contact you? 

Best Regards,  Allen

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Maybe I will see you walking down the street soon. Hope you have been kind to me...

Just here in the forum using pm would be fine.

Thanks!

_________________
Michelle Bisson, POPcliQ, http://www.popcliq.com
Joomla / OSM Trademarks Team Member

To Michelle Bisson

Hello I'm new to joomla and I'm interested in doing some video tutorials for the key features for example installation, content management using sections categories and content itself, components, modules, template construction etc
I'm still learning how to use joomla at the moment. Hopefully by the end of september or mid October i should have some video tutorials done.

I was wondering if you could give me feedback on what areas you think would need step by step video tutorials. I think it could work well together with documentation that other users might be working on and also all the documentation joomla already has which is quite extensive.

I could have a video tutorial on installation done very soon just to show u what I'm aiming for as a finished product.

Tim

Yaaaay...we like tutorials...and volunteers!

Sounds good! Keep us posted!

A few other suggestions for tutorials are:

1. Creating menus
2. Creating Sections, categories and articles
3. Creating and configuring modules

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Michelle Bisson, POPcliQ, http://www.popcliq.com
Joomla / OSM Trademarks Team Member

Nice plug Amy but there's no active link and I do have Flash enabled. I was salivating when I say the website - a dream come true.

EDIT: We updated the Flash player and I'm tellin' you - it's a great site. Thanks for the link Amy

hi

A search of this site under tutorial videos will throw up some links - some relate to the earlier incarnation of Mambo but still have some relevance under 1.0.x.

We are always open to other volunteers who are prepared to participate in providing help so if you want to get involved in producing a missing resource then start 'filming' by all means.

Same goes for your other post on the subject...

Regards

Andy

Thanks or all your tips! Today I got an email that someone replied to this topic and nothing up until today. Which means, unfortunately, that I hadn't even seen any responses until today....been busy getting my Joomla site up!  ChiefGoFor has been amazingly helpful in helping me get the site up on its feet.

I'll try and check out these other resources people have posted and also try to put together some ideas for a set of basic tutorials...especially now that I'm much further along the path of where I was a few months ago. I still think that showing the process of putting together a sample site is the best way to show new users how to use Joomla. Macromedia did an example of this called "Pet Market" which showed off cool a fictitious online store could be and and how easy it could be built using Flash & ColdFusion.  Check it out here:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/blueprint/

Something Joomla-specific would be cool. Build a cool demo site specifically around the features of Joomla and them put together a dozen or so tutorials on how to complete the site. Then maybe a few bonus tutorials if there are popular third-party components you want to feature.

Thanks!

_________________
Joomla Leadership Team
Author of Using Joomla from O'Reilly Media. | http://www.usingjoomlabook.com/
Creative Director, Kontent Design http://www.kontentdesign.com

Hi Sverdia

I am glad the message that the topic had been moved has brought you back and you have found what was posted. If you do have any thoughts on documents/tutorials of use then please let us know.

Also if you have the time perhaps consider contributing to the current projects to write the Help Screens for 1.5.

Let us know on either of these and we will try and hook you up as best we can

Andy

Hi,
I have watched a few joomla video tutorials where everything is shown step by step process. I have written whatever i have learnt from these videos in my site( included in the signature below). I would like it if you could take a look at those tutorials and give me some feedback. I have tried to make it as simple as possible and included steps to be taken .

bye,
faraz

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Joomla tutorial for non tech beginners -- http://joomlatraining.wordpress.com/

Joomla Tutorials For dummies(Free for Limited time)--- http://www.squidoo.com/building-a-joomla-website/

Hey guys

Sorry i havent been in touch in absolute ages, Just started UNI after finishing college and its been a busy first year, just about to get my first proper Joomla site up. You alwys muck about with joomla but to apply it to a real life use i found takes a bit more time and care if your a newby but nearly there. Ill post the site here when its up and running properly still tweaking it.

Gd things is though ive learnt alot from all spects of it from template creation to numerous installition tricks that save time to a bit of PHP coding. I'm going to put together a list of tutrials i think would benefit people who had just got started. Then ill start recording them and test them then hopefully host them.

Keep it cool

Tim