mrr2ro
New User
Dec 6, 2006, 10:45 PM
Post #1 of 3
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Improving Documentation
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Hello there.
This is intended to be POSITIVE feedback, not a rant.
We have been using Job Manager for quiet some time but needed the RSS feature so we were steered towards Article manager. I thought it may sound like fitting a round peg in a square hole, but posting a job is not different than posting an article so we decided to get it.
I found the documentation lacking the most basic guidance for a normal NON technical user. The documentation reads to me as if it was written by developers for developers and with the idea that whoever was going to read the documentation was familiar using Article Manager 1 already and therefore Article manager 2 is an upgrade for previous users, and NOT a clean new installation for a brand new user. Therefore; the documentation ignores basic things that a new user will be dumbfounded trying to find things amongst the *few* files and folders.
I think more detail needs to be incorporate in the templates and style sheets sections. In my case I am more concerned to get the out of the box system looking like my current website, so I can integrate it with my current look and feel rather than the guts of the system. The out of the box templates, work just fine for me, I just do not like the title, color scheme and fonts.
You do a good job explaining the nitty-gritty and the guts of the templates but fail to mention the basics of where to find them, what files/outputs/views/pages each template control and how to work with the style sheets.
A simple line in the templates help file, something (STATING THE OBVIOUS of course) … “The templates are found in the XYZ folder, the sub folders are named in respect to what section they control and the file names inside the sub folder will indicate the page they control. You can edit these templates with XYZ” --- as I said stating the obvious but very helpful for mere mortals.
Same thing about style sheets – Are the style sheets mentioned anywhere?
IMOHO - There is a LOT of reverse engineering that has to be done by a knowledgeable person to be able to make any sense of what goes with what – if someone wants to start from scratch with this, they are going to have a very difficult time getting anywhere.
I am not a novice and had to click through lots of folders and open several files, inspect them and see how they are connected, what they are including, etc. Before I got an understating of how to configure this thing so it kind of looks like my website.
INSTALLATION
Installation on LINUX, following the instructions on file naming and location up to this point, in the last step it says to load the file
www.yoursite.com/artman2/adming.cgi such file does not exists – Based on how strict the cgi-bin access and the server configuration is. The file exists in www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/artman2/admin.cgi
Granted there is information about this in the troubleshooting “program not found”, but it could be added as an option – something like “if www.yoursite.com/artman2/admin.cgi does not work, then try www.yoursite.com/cgi-bin/artman2/admin.cgi" Nips it right there and then.
The free installation and setup is a great thing, but people like to customize things themselves - otherwise it is not quiet custom, is it?
English is NOT my first language, but I hope this gives you an idea for improvements in the documentation.
Other than that, this is a superb product.
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