create community driven default start points

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I’ve been watching the random shows and reading the forms and it sees like concrete5 wants to try and close the gap between “a single solution web builder” vs something broad that can be used to build anything (that I find concrete5 sits in).

I was wondering if there was a way you could create an import and export (web setup settings) type of thing. So in the future the community could upload there favorite starting point for creating a site for different categories such as a small business to art blog to a dog shelter. I’m thinking this could be an extension to the how to section so when Mary Sue wants to create a wedding site for a friend. She can see what other community members have done and have the ability to grab the starting point she likes and have direction to what add-ons to buy to help Mary Sue quickly complete her project.

Just a thought.

I know it was mentioned in the show that it seemed like there was going to be some effort to create more default starting points for different type of sites. To me I think if there was some way to have it community driven it would help grow concrete5 beyond what the competition is doing . Maybe there could be a voting process and at the end of each month 1-2 could chosen to be put in a building showcase or something.

(just a random brain fart)

SheldonB
 
adajad replied on at Permalink Reply
adajad
I see what you are after here, and just for the record you can create a starting point pretty easy by following this how-to: http://www.concrete5.org/documentation/how-tos/developers/concrete5...

As for the voting and starting point showcases I think that would take some time to implement, but I can totally see the benefits for new users that want to know if you can build this or that with concrete5.
mhawke replied on at Permalink Reply
mhawke
I think this would go a long ways to help with the "point and shoot" crowd. It's sort of like setting up your accounting package for the first time and it will ask you what type of business you run and will set up the accounts that 90% of those businesses need.

Unfortunately, I've tried the tutorial and the Sample Content Generator package breaks in 5.6 (in my experience... YMMV)

http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/sample-content-generato...

"Support for versions about 5.6 is limited and not fully tested."

The process is complicated enough, let alone trying to debug the package on the fly. If someone smarter than I would like to work on the package, it's on GitHub

https://github.com/concrete5/addon_sample_content_generator...
JohntheFish replied on at Permalink Reply
JohntheFish
I like the idea. Having a selection of targeted starting points instead of just the default sample content could help a lot of users.

Getting beyond that, starting points that require/use specific addons may be awkward to manage as part of site installation.

There was a forum thread way back from someone creating a business specific installer that pulled in their 'company standard' addons and sample content.
SheldonB replied on at Permalink Reply
SheldonB
mhawke - yeah that's kinda of what I was thinking of

I guess to get beyond on that it would require something to built so that a user could write a blog like tutorial that would have to go along with it.

I don't know how realistic making this idea happen is. It's kind of one of those ideas that is like wouldn't it be cool if this also did that.

I had this image of someone downloading concrete5 opening the front page and the how-tos would be searchable kind of like a windows 8 side slide bar - then within the how-tos could be the different *styled_settings(sample content) that could be loaded on request