Hi Will,

Yes very strong and rather un-appreciative. My apologies and I thankyou for your help.

At the time of writing, I had been posting on the EE forum about a test bed I was putting together and response was rapid and many. It was more a "big difference" than "close to zero".

Cheers
Aaron

Hi folks. I've been building a (first) SS site of reasonable complexity over the last couple of weeks, and I agree with the sentiments expressed:

1) SS is a *very* promising CMS and framework that among other things, actually got the MVC and templating issues right.
2) The lack of coherent documentation is a serious problem.

My experience is that 80% of the time I can find an answer to how a particular feature, API, or technique works by hunting in the forums. Why aren't these collected and rolled back into the main docs? Isn't there a "documentation czar" that acts as the focal point for such things? There should be. Some of the main docs are several versions old and exclude what have become the current API's / preferred methods for doing things.

I would be happy to pitch in $25 bucks or more, and even put significant energy into point out documentation bugs, as I have a few times in the past, but only if I sensed that it was a priority on the part of the company to follow up --which I don't particularly. Unfortunately for adoption, the attitude toward documentation seems to be the typical start-up, early phase, everyone on their own hunting on the forums and irc sort of thing.

Let's graduate from that. I think we would all benefit.

with admiration,
Artyom

Artyom - your post is not completely true. For example - see my post about the sidebar formatting issue with Firefox in this forum. There is no-one else who had the same issue, going by a forum search. I sort of agree with Double-a-ron in his original post on this thread, SS needs to 'grow up'..

@Nostrad - Considering your sidebar issue has nothing to do with SS and is a CSS/html issue I dont think you can use that as evidence of SS needing to 'grow up'.

@double-a-ron - EE is a paid solution, cositng $250 per install, if they didnt have a better support level at that price it would not be able to compete. To put it in perspective, if SS had $250 for just 10% of it's downloads (15,000) it would have an extra $3.7 MILLION to provide support. And that's not even going near the modules side of things ($100 for a forum?). I say given those figures SS is doing rather well. And having looked at EE, I find the interface doesn't even come close to SS's for ease of use and logical layout.

Yes, there are many challenges that need to be overcome, documentation and ticket resolution being 2 major ones, but given it's age and number of active community members I'd say SS is looking extremely competative. If you compare it to other new Opensource CMS's (Conrete 5 being a good example), SS has a good level of documentation and support. It's nowhere near perfect, and I know from experience how frustrating it can be when you can't find something that should be simple, but things are getting better, the forums are now a lot more active than they were less than a year ago and there should be some new official docs being released soon, along with the book. And of course there is SSbits.com which I hope to slowly build into a reference for all those easy-but-hard-to-find issues.

SS is growing up, slowly but surely and sooner or later it may well be in a position to competing with the big boys on every level.

@Aram = you are not qualified to say that it is not a SS issue. If something included in the package does not produce the expected result, then it is an issue of the software indeed. For example, I am doing this job for a client, and have given him a preview - most embarassing is that he pointed out this issue to me. Can I just tell him that it is a problem with the HTML or CSS ? How would that be ? I would lose this job and a client to boot. If you can't help out , don't post and waste everyone's time and desperate user's patience. I am so desperate with this issue, and waiting for the developers to respond to me. If no responses, I will have a totally negative view of this software, and will move to some other platform. I repeat if you can't help out don't respond to me with some obscure remarks. I repeat it is an issue that the SilverStripe support needs to specifically look into and help me with.

@ nostrad - I am qualified to tell you that because I know exactly what the issue is (I posted a fix on the other thread). It was a simple CSS issue. The example theme that comes with SS is exactly that, an example. You were trying to use it out of it's specification (i.e. having 2 line menu items) and so would be expected to adjust the CSS accordingly. It was not a problem with SS the CMS software.

SilverStripe is explicity targeted at people who can edit CSS and HTML as well as have a basic understanding of PHP. If you do not meet that criteria you cannot expect everything to just work 'out of the box'. SS is not comparable to thing like wordpress and is not trying to be.

@Aram, sorry for coming down harshly on you (Posted on other thread too). It's just that I was struggling all week, and with no solution in sight, my frustration built up to the point of anger that no one from the SS team was bothered to respond. It is almost the end of the weekend - do you mean that the SS support volunteers don't read the forums? Just a simple reply saying that 'we acknowledge the issue and are looking at it - we will get back to you' or something like that would have eased my nerves a little. Just for information, I do know HTML, CSS and PHP but not 'super expert' level. The CSS in the Layout.css especially for the sidebar menu has multiple nestings and difficult to hang-on to when trying to understand. (I have the firebug extension installed in Firefox, so can see that). That the resolution was as simple as deleting a single line that applied fixed-height formatting - was completely beyond my imagination.

Anyway, now that it is resolved, I am feeling at ease. Onward to implementing the scrolling news section.. Thanks for your help.

@nostrad - Appology accepted, we've all been there :)