The wiki

[Jimbobway]

I have honestly become do disheartened to SugarCRM because of the terrible state of the wiki.

I am new to sugar in 5.0 and i have been so confused by the wiki as that it is very out of date it would seem. Most of the sections are not even filled.

I believe the SugarTeam shoudl provide much better documentation if they intend this product to become truely what it is meant to be.

Does anybody else feel this way? or am I alone in this?

[wjohnson]

I feel (and I'm sure there are a lot of people in this forum that agree) that Sugar has completely dropped the ball with this 5.0 release. It is full of bugs, forum posts are flat out being ignored, bug fixes are very slow in coming, documentation is incomplete or wrong. I had hoped moving to the GPL would helped all of those things but everything just seems to be getting worse.

Maybe this is a sign of their venture capital drying up?

[Angel]

Just my 2 cents, but I think you are reading a little too much into this and making some leaps of faith for unrelated matters.....

While I agree that documentation needs to be improved (a long standing critique), I don't believe the lack thereof is related to the amount of funding that Sugar Inc has or the type of license being used, etc.

I remember the days when there weren't any videos or other resources, like the Wiki and dev blog, which are now available. So, from my perspective, things have improved. Can they be improved some more? Of course, but my main point is that things have gotten better over time, not worse.

I can tell you from first hand experience that producing technical docs for the masses is not a simple task, nor is it a fast paced one. Just an observation on my part, but I often find that people have a difficult time distinguishing the difference between *writing* a document and *typing* a document. The latter is always a much faster venture as one already knows which keys to hit.

Anyway, not to get on the soapbox or anything, but I would point out that at the bottom of the wiki, you will find this bit of text: "The Sugar Wikis are maintained by volunteers from the Sugar Community. Sugar Docs and Sugar University are maintained by the staff of SugarCRM Inc. "

Thus, in the end, all of us are partly at fault for the contents (or lack thereof) of the Wiki. If that isn't GPL-"esque", I don't know what is.

I know I barely have time to put some posts up on these forums in my attempt to try to help. I don't even mess with the Wiki because I too agree that it needs to be written in a format that is acceptable to the masses and I also know that takes time, which is often in short supply for me.

[wjohnson]

You're right that the license does not have to do with the documentation. I had hoped that moving to the GPL would grow the community (and thus the wiki). I'm sure that SugarCRM Inc. thought the same thing and it was probably one of their reasons behind their decision to move to the GPL.

That said, I absolutely believe that the lack of updates to the wiki can at least by partly attributed to the problems that I stated. When the functionality of a module gets changed in the users eyes without any word on the reasoning (for example the project tasks) or even whether or not that was an error or bug, then what is supposed to go into the wiki? Does someone create a workaround and post it there? Post the assumption that it is a bug and will get fixed later? Write a fix themselves and hope that Sugar decides to accept it and post it in the wiki if they don't? Open a support case and hope for a resolution? I can say from experience that the last one has not worked for me before.

Bottom line is that if users were spending less time fighting bugs (and getting any sort of guidance on the ones they find) then they would be spending more time writing documentation in the wiki.

[Angel]

Well, I can't speak to the reasons as to why you haven't had success with support cases. The folks at Sugar will have to address that point.

As for your other questions, the spirit of the Wiki is intended to address the issues you describe. i.e. I type something in that might be useful to others (regardless of whether or not it is an "official" bug) and others are free to contribute to or correct my entry. The problem is that there aren't enough entries for certain topics and/or some of them need to be massaged a bit to make them more acceptable for the masses.

As a sidenote, I do think it is a bit of stretch to imply that the reason why there aren't more entries is because users are busy fighting bugs. I don't spend all day fighting bugs and I don't contribute to it. I gave reasons why in my earlier post. Second to that, if I were a sales manager, I doubt I would want my sales team to spend their idle time working on Wiki entries for Sugar as opposed to figuring out how to make more sales.

I've always thought it would be a good idea to have a designated Wiki editor that can handle the issues we've discussed. But Sugar shouldn't be expected to fill that role as they've indicated the Wiki is community maintained, not necessarily their work. That being said, I do recall seeing a recent post from Sugar where they indicated they were looking at deploying a knowledgebase, which I fully support and have wanted. That would hopefully solve a lot of the issues we've highlighted.

[wjohnson]

The original poster's complaint was that the wiki is incomplete and outdated (a lot of info points to versions earlier than 5.0). I just don't see how that can get updated/supported by the community (as is supposed to happen as you pointed out) if people like I are holding off rolling out 5.0 until some of the many bugs I see posted about are fixed. And the users who have made the change seem to be frailing around looking for any sort of direction on the bugs they are experiencing.

[Jimbobway]

This product is revolutionary end of list. I have never coded so little and spent so much time.... the good news.. if I did it again I would do it in 10% the time. I got some seriously massive respect to the programmers... there so smart they lost touch with the rest of us though it seems..

THe documentation just needs a push in the right direction. Since the source files come without any documentation other then user docs.

The wiki needs to be torched. Yes Quite litterly.. remove the whole dang thing.. Its confusing, out of date, and lacks the proper information in many cases, points you in the wrong direction.. is confusing as hell to new people.. I was new to version 5.0 i had never coded for sugar in 5-, and i had the unfortunate experience to read the wiki for 4 days straight to find out that I had mostly wasted my time.

The error messages for errors in the def files are cryptic and do not really point you in the right direction.


I would be willing to post some documentation about removing certain features.. as that my client wanted the thing stripped quite heavily.. and I seem to know what im doing there now..

[Jimbobway]

Regards the bugs..

I dont think there are actually that many bugs.. I was playing the blame game for a while to.... the trick is to realize that you need to not think so procedurally(i know its tough! believe me!) and start thinking how to edit the bean code and realize that the system is also dynamically writing bean code for you in most cases.. you must be very careful not to use the module builder after doing customizations to the modules folder directly.. as that when you redeploy, all your crap is going away.. is this mentioned in the wiki? Not exactly.. unfortunate really..

So how do we write override and 'upgrade safe' bean code in the custom directory? Well it seems to me that the custom directory is doing more then we think and even though it says custom and its supposedly upgrade safe in there its actually also being written to by the module builder.. the wiki has nothing on this.. it doesn't tell you what files you should edit in the new versions.. it does't tell you what files you should stay away from.. its pretty much just like "Hey, have a masterpiece... but itll only be a masterpeice if you can figure out how to use it".

Sugar is abstraction layer on abstraction layer on abstraction layer squared.. anymore down this road and the code is going to quite literally write itself.. we of the community need to step up and start writing documentation.. The lest we can do for this amazing application.