FIRSTLY - I do apologise if anyone does not like what I am going to say, Im only being truthful.

The system is well developed and fantastic for use, but the support on here and for Silverstripe is the worst by miles to any other opensource CMS on the web. The forum is riddled with questions without answers, tutorials don't make sense and are merely a "Tutorial" as they don't explain nor work. I have tried over 5 Tutorials which do not work and then when you search on the "Support" forum you get questions upon questions without answers.

Come on SS team, get yer fingers out...your going to run this great CMS into the ground...

Hi jmdweb,

We're currently in the middle of revamping the tutorials; hopefully the new tutorials will make more sense to you. Many people have been able to learn how to use SilverStripe from the tutorials.

We're also looking at ways that we can ensure that fewer support questions slip through the cracks.

Did you have a question that you wanted to ask?

No problem with being honest. However, do not forget that most people here _did_ learn how to use Silverstripe by reading through the docs and the tutorials and using the forum. I guess it depends a lot on where you are coming from : people with a technical background feel comfortable with the system a lot quicker then (UI)-design oriented people. Sure , a lot of work still needs to be done on documentation and support , but do not forget that we , as users , need to be actively participating as well to get the ball rolling.

Myself , I can clearly see the community gaining momentum ... The number of active and proliferate members is growing and the amount of work being done by 'outsiders' (non-Silverstripe-employees) is growing with that as well ..... Be it in support on the forum , building new modules , fixing bugs etc. etc.

For me , the 2.0 version number is a bit misleading .... The community is still pretty much early-stage .. but I love it so far.

yep, you have to remember that currently the active community here on the forums is still relatively small, but it is growing. It takes time to build a community and so far I can see no signs of it going in any other direction than up. This new site is a testament to that.

I learn't SS from the tutorials and documentation and eventually the forum, and although I'm by no means an expert yet I can honestly say it has been one of the most enjoyable learning experiences I can remember. Granted it can be frustrating at times when you can't find an answer but I always got there in the end and learn't something else while trying! I had a little PHP and web experience prior to that but nothing major and though I can see how it would be tough for someone with no prior experience, I don't think SS is really aimed at those people, it assumes some prior knowledge of web technologies which IMO is right, after all we can't expect to be taught PHP/HTML/CSS as well as SS in the tutorials.

I agree that there are too many questions left unanswered in here, but hopefully as time goes on we can all help to change that, I don't think it's the sole responsibility of the Core Dev team to do that, I imagine in an ideal world they would only be answering advanced questions, but I guess were not quite there yet.

Anyway I think it's great that you are honest, but also try to understand where SS is right now :)

I went to write a reply to this last night but walked away from the computer when something came up. I now see a lot of what I was going to write already has been said, but I'll share my thoughts anyway.

The tutorials do work. They are outdated yes, but should still get the job done. They've been up for year(s) and have had many people complete them successfully. Generally speaking, when something goes wrong with them, it's a mistake on the end users part, or possibly webhosting related.

As has been stated, SS is relatively new compared to a lot of the brand name CMSs out there. The forums aren't the busiest when compared to big names out there like Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress etc, but that is because the amount of users pales in comparison. This will get better over time. I came here one year ago this month, and I'll admit I was like you in being frustrated by the lack of support at first. It was a lot 'worse' back then as SS had only been open sourced recently. This is one of the reasons I participate as much as I do in this community. I wanted to see SS take off and knew it needed a growing community of support to help it with that. I'm a UI/Design person first, so I'm not an expert at all, but I always try to help out as much as I can.

Sure enough the community is getting larger and more 3rd party support/modules are coming in. You need to understand how the open source movement works, and that is by slowly building a community over time. SS is still very young. I have no doubts that as the years go by, SS will get up there in popularity and be used in the same sentence as all the other default, popular CMSs out there. Everybody I have showed SS to so far has loved it and used it in projects that make sense to. It's just about getting the word out right now.

The only problem I have with your honesty, is your statement about them running it into the ground. That couldn't be any more ignorant if you tried. The SS team is the ones responsible for the product and getting it to where it is today. It's not going anywhere but up. Everybody should feel lucky to have a group of people basically paid to work on an open source solution that we all get to use. The SS team might not be the busiest in the support forum, but they pretty much work on it everyday from a development standpoint.

Great responses firstly.
Few great comments and I do agree SS is a fantastic new breed of CMS (which I never denied) and is well deserved the credits and recognition but I have had some fast responses to this thread, but would I had such a fast response if I had a module or SS problem? I very much doubt it.

I understand this OS system is new and still building this support base and I really think if there was more support this product would go higher places in a shorter time.

You say (LeeUmm) "The tutorials do work. They are outdated yes, but should still get the job done"....I beg to differ, I am a developer and more design XHTML rather than PHP etc but I do know 100% a few of the tutorials do not work and rather help people they confuse alot of new users, whether they are out dated or due to my server (which I know is not the issue). If I didn't have the knowledge I wouldn't of got the issues sorted.

I put it down to SS being a little to raw at the moment and maybe soon it'll get better for other users, but I must admit its good in a selfish way, not any tom dick and harry can just upload and use it without some decent knowledge of how SS works. Unlike Joomla etc which I would never use due to that issue.

Thanks for all the replies, hopefully this moan has not done any bad but yet some good?! or pointless lol

Thanks anyways

Great job SS just maybe a few more SS Gurus needed!?

Hey jmdweb - I think I lot of the issues you raised are at the top of everyone's minds at the moment. Silverstripe.org was only launched recently (a few weeks ago) to specifically deal with some of those issues.

As others have said - it's all about size. The community is still small, and only a small part of it is really active. It's a catch-22 really, how to do get more people up to a level where they can help others if there are not enough skills out there to help them first.

Part of the issue with the forum is there a lot of questions asked before people look through the documentation or search the forum. It gets... frustrating... to answer the same questions over and over when there are only a few of us here to put in the time.

As for the tutorials - I'm surprised they're not working for you (although, note to self, some changes to CTF's might have impacts on the more advanced ones).

Anywho, we'd appreciate it if you stuck with it. And, if you learn something new, don't forget to add it to the wiki or post it here :)

I'd be curious to know which tutorials and parts don't work?

Another thing to keep in mind is that the holidays just passed so I'm sure people weren't as active. I know I was gone for 2 weeks and didn't visit at all.