We are working on it. Right now the best that we have is located under the Developer section of the Help area. There are good processes there and they should get you going.

If there are specific documents you would like to see in the mean time, ask in the Documentation forum and we will try and help there.

-Bill

Here's a word Doc I started a few weeks back...it may help find a few things. It's not complete but it's a start.

Thanks for your Word doc, I appreciate the help. It sounds like more than one person is working on a guide, we should find a way to coordinate efforts.

Just checked out that documentation you've been putting together marxion. Great work. If I were a new c5 developer, I think what would be most helpful for me would be a number of short tutorials on common tasks, such as how to build blocks, how to put together packages, add themes, check user permissions, manually create pages, etc. I guess a lot of that information is scattered throughout the forums right now, but it would be really nice to have that information organized better.

As a new C5 developer I can tell you it's difficult to find good tutorials or examples to get started. My theory is that Concrete wants to sell Support Plans so they purposely make it difficult to find information... Most of the articles assume you already know how to do something, and a lot of the articles are just rehashing the same concepts without actually telling you how to do it.

...as a part of the core team I can tell you outright that, no, c5 is not trying to keep things purposely vague just to up-sell you. The open-source side of c5 is still pretty young, and right now the company has to balance between maintaining and further developing the software, supporting the community, while juggling enough client work on the side to still pay the bills. This is an open-source project, meaning it's success is largely dependent on the effort of the community, and a few of the more active members have been kind enough to start digging deeper into the documentation side of things. I do hear where you're coming from though. The software is capable of doing a lot but there's a bit of a learning curve, and much of that isn't documented very well. But I do think you can expect more on this front coming down the pipe over the next few months.

Tony and GrfxMaster - We agree with your concerns about the documents and the things you would like to have in the documents/help area. We really are trying to get these things going.

As an Open Source Project, documentation is usually the last thing on the primary developers minds. I believe with what is in the help section it is a great place for review at the moment. There are a lot of users (both beginners and developers) that have posted a lot of good things.

The documentation efforts are being undertaken by volunteers and run through Franz and the members he chooses to verify the docs. So this will take a bit of time.

We are taking Topics from the forums that a lot of people have had questions on. Then, we are sifting through the responses and trying to put some cohesive documents together on that subject.

Between real life work and family and friends, along with doing this as volunteers, it will take a little bit of time.

Please be patient and search the forums for now. We are hoping to have the Beginner Guide (rough draft) available next week. Then we will be taking marxion's document that he started and expanding on that.

Patience Grasshoppers and it will come.

-Bill

I think that maybe lot of people going through the forums are overlooking these pages too:

http://www.concrete5.org/help/using_concrete5/how-tos...

http://www.concrete5.org/help/using_concrete5/editing...

Tony can you contact me off line please.
bcarone@carolinageek.com

-Bill

As CEO of concrete CMS I can assure you nothing is further from the case.

Yes, we need to make money. We have children and homes and whatnot.

No, our strategy isn't to upsell you on our services work. To be completely transparent, our goal is to make all our money from the Partner Plans, the Marketplace, and Hosting - in that order.. Services is at the bottom of our list of desires.

Yes, we do services work - it is simply the easiest way for us to make money today.

I feel its important to stress - there are no Angel or VC investors behind concrete5. There is no huge SUN or IBM like company that has just put us in some basement room on salary. We're in the exact same boat as everyone else here - making payroll in a recession, week by week. I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing - probably a bit of both, but it is the reality today.

So I totally hear the need - "we love the cms, we want to understand it better!" Tony is right, we are reorganizing things in help. We are creating a beefier FAQ section. We are going to start doing weekly screencasts like wordpress.tv does. We're doing what we can here - again, for free.

I feel it's important to point out, that while we recognize our documentation isn't as "amazing" as our CMS - this is not a problem unique to us, and frankly even if we had VC or Angel funds I'm not sure we could eliminate the learning curve for everyone. Let's face it, concrete5 does a lot. It's half CMS, half framework. It's pretty unique from most of the competition in approach, so there's ALWAYS gonna be a "wow that's tricky to figure out" moment for new folk with concrete5 - even a year from now when our docs are shiny and we've published "concrete5 for dummies". ;)

What everyone can do to really help is get active in the documentation forum. Post things you want us to screencast on there. Post lessons you've learned so we can re-post them in the docs section. To be completely blunt (again) every time someone has given us something cohesive and correct, we've quickly posted it or linked to it. I can't count the number of times someone has come along and said "I'm gonna write all this documentation.." and then I never hear anything from them after a week or two... Just post what you've learned - it doesn't take massive policy changes or new collaboration tools, just an hour or two of writing and hit the send button - we'll do the rest!

If you're really interested in the motivation behind concrete5, I'd urge you to read my blog posts from last summer when we decided to give this thing away under the MIT license:

http://concretethestudio.com/2008/04/21/cranberries-in-oregon/...

http://concretethestudio.com/2008/05/10/wait-free/...

I apologize if this feels a bit like I'm lashing out - I guess you've accidentally hit a sensitive spot. I'm perfectly willing to accept constructive criticism, h3ll I'm perfectly willing to help people re-phrase their criticism into something that is constructive... However, I think anyone who knows me or has done their homework on our blog will agree - thinking that I'm "the man" couldn't be further from the truth.

nothing but love, power to the people.
-frz

I have to completely agree with you on your comments.

I am actually surprised that you haven't steam rolled anyone yet on the "I want to have" list.

(Showing my age here) Back when LAMP was starting to gain more and more steam ('97/'98), there was no money (or very little) for developing of OS software. Now, big companies are supporting it because of value added to their Strategic Sales campaigns. My hat is off to you guys.

On today's economy, I am write there with your brother. Finishing a gig and then the one scheduled to start that was suppose to last nearly 5 months and it fizzled in the wind sure has taken my sails down. So trying to make ends meet is tough. THAT is why I want (and will continue) to help in the documentation process. Not only is it helping me maintain my sanity and gives some purpose (professionally), the side benefit is that maybe, just maybe, someone will want to hire me for a side gig or three.

So, I don't think your "the Man". A frustrated pirate on a slow boat to china maybe, but not the man.

Come join the right coast pirates, we will give you an original boat drink.

-bill

Frz, Bill,

Thanks for your response. I appreciate hearing that Concrete is working on improving help and documentation and not trying to upsell support in place of documentation (some companies do this unfortunately).

I understand the challenges of open-source projects, and you are right, documentation is often the last step.

As someone new to C5, it's been tough to find answers to what I think are simple questions. So far I have been able to find answers to my questions, mostly via the forum. But in my opinion, a lot of the help resources on this site seem geared towards developers who are already familiar with the inner workings of C5 as opposed to someone who's never used it before.

I'm really liking C5 and plan to use it for all future websites I develop. I tried dozens of CMS systems and they were all more complicated than they needed to be. I'm a web designer first, and a programmer second, and the simplicity of C5's template system makes it ideal for a designer.

Thanks.

-J

P.S. Frz, Sorry for hitting a sore spot. C5 is an excellent product and I look forward to participating in the community as I get better acquainted with the system.

No worries GrfxMaster - you certainly are our target audience and we're committed to doing everything we can to make to make the learning curve less painful for you.

No need to apologize, clearly there's a lot of independent developers like bcarone who are worried about the problem, and Andrew, Tony, Ryan, Me and the Beta Team are pondering the issue constantly.

The statement that the docs are written with an expert's point of view is probably quite accurate and telling. My little shop wrote concrete cms back in 2003 and have been working with it ever since, so there's certainly always been a "Ask Andrew" approach to problems and it's a hard habit to break..

Like I said above, best thing that EVERYONE can do to help is just post your learning in the documentation forums as you figure it out.. We're very active here, and it will also help everyone one else, and we'll start repurposing this stuff into help docs more.