Calling clued-in people - your wiki needs you!

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
And now, to celebrate the arrival of my new green dot -- I want to draw the attention of the People Who Know What They're Doing (and they know who they are) to an initiative (it sounds better than 'page') that I've been pondering for a while, and finally got around to doing something about on the wiki.

We all know the 'how do I get my title/menu/header/footer/login-name/starsign appearing on every page?' question pops up every few minutes - and there's a few other thread subjects that are just as regular as a high bran diet, too.

Some of you guys have taken to experimenting with responding in fewer and fewer words, which is fascinating to watch - while others just have a stock response they seem to paste in (in my case my stock response now includes links to threads that I think have particularly brightly coloured text). All these are good, but they tend to get lost in time, like tears in an overly-chlorinated swimming pool.

Anyhoo, to cut a long story short is not my style. I thought that for all these subjects where there's no clearly Right Way To Do It, we could have a corner of the wiki where we could wax lyrical on our particular ways of doing these things.

The idea includes:
o identifying and generalising the questions that come frequently
o walking the new CI user through how you do that particular task
o identifying your CI-forum handle so that we can clarify things with you
o putting your stuff into the wiki - not just posting a link into the forums, or to an off-site resource
o don't edit other people's pages - that kind of defeats the point

The first two are easy.

The third might be a bit annoying, but I think it's worth a go - easy enough to remove it later and have the details quickly lost in the mess that is the wiki changelog.

The fourth might annoy anyone with a page 'ready to go', but I don't think we need Yet Another list of internet resources. There's enough of those suckers out there, and whilst google can possibly find them amongst the millions of similar pages, the wiki search engine certainly would not.


So - long story slightly less long - if you want to have a browse around over there, please do - and I hope you might consider contributing. Please note that the way categories work is a bit of an unholy mess. When you want to modify the indexing pages,to insert in the link to your new page, just make sure you go to the URL bar in your browser and remove the string Category: otherwise you'll find the subject-index page content mysteriously empty.

URL is: [url="http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Approaches/"]http://codeigniter.com/wiki/Approaches/[/url]

[eluser]Yorick Peterse[/eluser]
I'll add a copy of the the Better super .htaccess guide from Daniel Moore

EDIT: Nevermind, I guess missing a small part makes you stupid instantly. Jezus...

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
Hmm, CI ate my reply there, before you re-edited.

The point is that this is a place that users go to find personal(!) approaches(!) to problems that have multiple(!) and non-obvious(!) and non-covered-by-extant-CI-documentation(!) ways of attending to them.

The site has enough Pages Full Of Links To Resources. The wiki is messy enough already. My goal here is pretty clear, I think.

Just keep thinking ... what's my approach to this common problem and you'll be fine.

[eluser]InsiteFX[/eluser]
Hi jedd,

I agree with you a 100%, but the biggest problem I have seen is that new users do not read the CodeIgniter users guide. Then they expect you to write the code for them.

I just beat my brains out for the last 3 days designing the new Fresh CMS menuing system.
I will post it when its completed.

Database driven.
Top and bottom menu bars with sub menus.
Vertical menu with sub menus.

I need to document it and do some clean up first, the menus are pure CSS no javascript. They are working now.

Enjoy
InsiteFX

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
[quote author="InsiteFX" date="1251176245"]Hi jedd,

I agree with you a 100%, but the biggest problem I have seen is that new users do not read the CodeIgniter users guide. Then they expect you to write the code for them.[/quote]


Absolutely, and I don't expect to fix that problem with this .. err .. initiative.

My primary, simple, achievable goal is that when someone pops into the forums with a 'Hey, I just realised that I'm copying a lot of code into all my controllers, surely there's a better way?' rather than the current response - which is several people offer their opinions, re-hashing what they've said a hundred times already, and perhaps having a go at the poster for not using the search feature - all it will take is for one person to point them at the relevant 'Approaches page' in the wiki.

That's gotta be something we can accomplish, right?

Of course, explaining why you then won't write their code for them .. well, I'll leave that up to you.

Longer term, too, I'd love to help tidy up the wiki - it's a total mess at the moment - but I think the job is a) too large for one person, and b) infeasible to do with more than one person.


Hey, Yorick - I know you know more about CI than I do, and I don't think you're stupid. I do think that when faced with a wiki page you did the usual deer-in-headlights thing that people do when they see a wiki, and thought 'hey, I know - I'll post a link', rather than read through my message (above) and my blurb on the wiki page(s). I don't believe you could ever point at any new-user's forum posting where the question 'The Super .htaccess Guide?' was asked.