I'm in the process of writing a beginner's guide that will help our clients use the WYSIWYG functions of c5 to edit their own sites. We are deploying more and more c5-based sites, and it's nice to be able to give clients a manual of sorts to get them started.
I thought I'd share it with the community, and hopefully get some feedback on how to improve it.
Here are some points:
- It's not a full manual, so the dashboard isn't covered. This is intended intially for sites where the client will primarily be editing text/images in the front end.
- I'm not sure i've covered all the pertinent stuff. Please let me know if there's anything else you think should be in it and I'll consider adding it.
- It's not totally generic - there are some references to my company. If there's enough interest, I'll strip these out so that it refers to c5 only.
- It's CC-BY-SA licensed, so once it's finished you'll be able to use it to give to your clients too (while please sharing back your improvements..:D). Once it's done I'll post the ODT file so you can play with the raw text.
- Eventually this might blossom into a full-blown manual. I've discovered I quite enjoy writing this stuff.
Written in Libre Office, using Firefox + Screengrab addon + GIMP + Paint.net + Greenshot.
I think that's about it.
Any feedback much appreciated :)
(the c5 site's upload function is totally hosed, it would seem...)
Yeah I see your point, but c5 isn't sufficiently simple to merit a bullet-point 1-page guide, but is simple enough to allow for a relatively-simple guide instead of a full manual.
Maybe cheat sheet's the wrong phrase.. 'introduction'?
This kind of user manual would be perfect to release in a 'Users Guide' block. It'd be awesome to have all this material quickly installed (and perhaps customized based on the sections needed) for the clients accessible right through their Dashboard.
That's actually not a bad idea. I see it as another Dashboard page called Guides or something like that.
Would be nice to have an open architecture so the community can contribute guides (or rather the user/developer can 'install' certain guides for their clients).
I like where this is going. I'm willing to donate some dev time on this.
Would be happy to help as well. I'm already currently planning on putting together two guides for a large client- one for the basic users (read non-techies) and another for the more advanced IT support team. I have these set-up as secured pages, but a dashboard integration might make more sense.
To add on- we're also making professional screen casts of a university site to demo how to do some of the basics. We find that videos do better than text with the older crowd. Perhaps these would be useful to integrate into the support block as Vimeo videos?
True, different types of media should definitely be supported. I'll think on this one a bit and possibly start a new thread for planning. Lots of other devs here would chime in I'm sure.
I like the idea, especially the notion that it could be collaborative. c5 has the necessary editing functions to write the stuff (although screenshots I don't know about...) and it would be cool to have a system whereby people could suggest changes, not unlike the collaborative process used to draft the GPLv3.
This way writing/editing would be decentralised, meaning documentation could be kept up-to-date more easily. It might also allow addon developers to create their own addon documentation which could plug in nicely to the architecture (much like LucasAnderson suggested).
Despite all this, there is still a place for a printed manual for clients who like to read as they are working, and I hope to try and fulfil that need if I can't contribute to the online version.
This cheat sheet is great and a STEP UP from the documentation/manual we supply clients from a previous writer. Alas finding time ourselves to write a full manual ourselves is at present, impossible.
