Great recent Wiki posts

[lvangool]

I'd like to take the opportunity to pad a few guys on the back, especially those who added the numerous Wiki pages! With screenshots and good texts, we can answer questions even before we hear them.

Now may be a good time to structurally refer people asking common questions about customization, permissions, errors etc, and spend our time doing NEW things, and let the computers automate the rest .

[susiewilliams]

Hi there,

I want to thank the community as well for the wiki (and other) contributions. By the way, if you stumble across (or actually write, for that matter) a post that you feel should be highlighted in the new Developer website, please drop me a line via PM and I'll make sure the developer site has a direct pointer to it.

Regarding automating answers to a lot of the easy "How Do I" questions, on some of the forums if you are starting to post a new thread, there's a blurb at the top of the forum page pointing out various reference sites. The idea is to save you from posting if you can find the answer first. We were just discussing extending this verbiage to all forum threads so you always see the list. I'll look into what it would take to do this.

[lvangool]

Great! Most users asking these questions seem to be non-technical, non-professional Sugar users. The wiki pages reflect that level of knowledge, by using screenshots and such, which is great.

Also, I'm still wondering why there's no real developers community going on. There are a lot of topics on the speed and performance of Sugar. Of course Jacob is doing a great job with his blog posts, but it may be a good idea if a few experts start working on the problem also?

[dtokeefe]

The Developer Website is certainly a good idea. Any chance it could be set up as a wiki? The way it is today, the links go all over the place, to different areas of the Sugar site and even to sites outside of Sugar. Kind of confusing. And it's not clear how a developer can even contribute.

What would be really helpful now, as we all transition to SugarCRM 5.0, is a Developer Wiki with documentation, tutorials, examples and techniques for working with 5.0. Currently, the only ways to figure it out are searching for helpful tidbits in the forum threads and reading the code to see how it works.

[lvangool]

What about a setup like over at Drupal?

http://api.drupal.org/

[susiewilliams]

Hi all,

Let me paint the picture of the dev site's evolution over the next few months (and explain a bit of the design philosophy we took):

First, when we set out to create the site, we looked at a number of other popular developer sites, some from the open source world and some from the commercial world (MySql and Yahoo were two inspirations). We wanted to create a starting place for developers who are new to Sugar, and for developers who need to get educated on any updates for the newest release that affect the way they need to design or code. We chose to link to a lot of existing content because we realized that we didn't need to start from scratch (there's a lot of good information out there already, but as people noted, it's scattered all over).

We have kept the wiki as a place for community members to contribute technical items as they did before. We regularly scan the wiki for useful articles, and incorporate pointers to them in the dev site. We have a new full-time Knowledgebase writer (Carlota) on staff now, and she's going through the wiki looking for those nuggets. Engineering has also stepped up to start writing some documentation that will be posted for everyone.

The longer term plan is to build out the Knowledgebase and to feed more of the content from there. We haven't implemented the KB yet, but it's Carlota's job to implement it and also to build in a way for the community to contribute to it as well. Timeframe for implementation is soon, but we're letting Carlota get up to speed on Sugar for a few weeks before inhumanely overloading her with work .

In addition to the material contributed by the community via the wiki (and later the KB), we're building out the Tutorial section of the website in two ways. We have a contractor (Emilio) who is doing a great job building those video tutorials you see there now. We also have built step-by-step instructions to build out a complete custom module; we used these during a recent "SI bootcamp" and plan on repurposing them for the dev site. It's on my short list to turn them into a working how-to guide ASAP.

Finally, we're seriously kicking around the idea of a "Developer Certification" course that we would offer to partners and developers; it would build on the tutorial material we have already created and would be offered around the timeframe of the next Global Developers Conference (tentatively slated for early February).

So, to sum up, shorter term you'll see a few more articles, tutorials and the hands on lab walkthrough; longer term, you'll see a KB tied in and a goal of 2-3x the current dev site content in the next few months.

Sound good?

[lvangool]

That sounds great Susie, especially the Certification plans, don't let that one slip away .

What I want to point out now, is that we developers need a API reference. Please look at Drupal's API link above, and click around. Every function, module, class etc has its own page with definitions and examples. Also, there are more abstract texts about the whole idea behind Drupal. This is what developers at my company use everyday to look up info on the functionality they want to implement.