Lack of documentation?
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- Henning
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- MrArtist
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As I mentioned in my earlier post "I recall from your newsletter or blog that you will be updating the forums in 2013".
On rereading the blog, in early Jan 2013 it was said for 6 months RT have been working on a redesign and the new site and forums will be based on J3.5 & Kunena. The roadmap for j3.5 is set for release in Sept 2013 so will the new site and reorganised content only be available some 15 months after realising the problem?
It still leaves a big hole in comprehending things for me today, for the past few months and the foreseeable future!
As Zoran suggested, things seem to be being made hard to do for ourselves. Indeed, one recent small problem I had with making the responsiveness of RokNavMenu stop being so responsive was replied to as being only for highly skilled paid-for support, whereas the actual solution turned out to be very simple and could have been made so by more appropriate specification and documentation.
I suppose one of the problems RT and users have is we're both looking at things from a slightly different perspective. On the one hand RT have made monthly templates that can be used as supplied, but to do so we have to get to grips with the technicalities ourselves and read through what is applicable or not. In the process we become tweakers and want or need to adjust the finely tuned templates to suit our needs. In fact by all the disparate sections of documentation supplied in its various forms we are encouraged to know what is going on behind the scenes, and by our nature as Joomla website developers, we do want and need to know.
So on the one hand we have templates supplied in a sort of Microsoft/Apple way of "this is how it is and you will do it this way", but at the same time we need to tinker and tweak to stop everything being the same or to stamp our own individuality and needs onto the design. For instance, the RokNavMenu design or the choice of font and typography is so rigidly structured in each template but I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking how nice a particular template is but if only I could change a particular part then it would be perfect for my needs.and functionality. This is why I tweak and I feel as though RT ought to have a tweak control interface for each part of the structure. e.g. an overall control panel that adjusts the individual elements rather than supply rigid designs that are very difficult to bend into shape through lack of well documented up-to-date structure and specification which must exist somewhere for you all to have done such a great job in putting it all together.
On the website for us trying to get to grips with what can or can't be done, to this day various parts of documentation still contain outdated and irrelevant sections that either no longer apply, belong to legacy extensions or are only relevant to certain older or newer templates. It took me ages to unravel the documentation for RokNavMenu which seems to still contain information to things that no longer exist ("Boost" and "Extended Link" I think from what I recall). It shouldn't take long for those in the know at RT to trawl through some of the content and add some notes or suggestions in here and there to aid users understand what is what.
I'm looking forward to the 2013 developments but September for the estimated J3.5 release seems a long way off right now.
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- Henning
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This is why I tweak and I feel as though RT ought to have a tweak control interface for each part of the structure. e.g. an overall control panel that adjusts the individual elements rather than supply rigid designs that are very difficult to bend into shape through lack of well documented up-to-date structure and specification which must exist somewhere for you all to have done such a great job in putting it all together.
You cant really have an option/setting for everything.
More options always means a slower template.
I can understand the frustration about the documentation – no excuse – but keep in mind RT is a pretty small company that sells awesome stuff for ... "cough"... peanuts.
Only 4 or 5 people do the hardcore coding stuff.
3 or 4 develop the templates.
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- MrArtist
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Henning wrote:
...keep in mind RT is a pretty small company that sells awesome stuff for ... "cough"... peanuts.
Only 4 or 5 people do the hardcore coding stuff.
3 or 4 develop the templates.
I appreciate what you are saying, indeed the whole concept of what is being done is remarkable when compared to what we couldn't do a few years ago.
And as for the central control panel idea, well that's just a dream of how it could be perhaps, sort of exterior to the Joomla install perhaps and then we import the code content for use within the template? Like the RokNavMenu, some great layouts in some templates that I'd maybe like to adapt for use in another, but the process of transposing the code and design variations seems to be less than simple.
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