Documentation

[yodam]

Hi,
After some days on Fabrik I think this extension it's a magical invention. Fabrik it's the best idea I see since years.

The problem it's the documentation that it's not complete, not all for joomla 3 (the documentation for joomla 2 was better) and not for designing big projects.

It's not true that a list it's a db table... it's more than this and the same for joins and "join on" plugin. A simple book of recipes like in video-tutorials or in this forum it's not sufficient.

I ask if there is a complete documentation that explain all that it's needed to become a real expert of Fabrik. I can accept to pay for it.

Thanks!

 

[Sophist]

Yodam

I think that most of the Fabrik community would agree that the documentation could be better, both for less technical people trying to do something simple, and for more technical wanting to do something sophisticated.

Unfortunately, the economics of open source projects like Fabrik are very slim, and what money there is needs to be spent either on keeping Fabrik in step with Joomla (like developing a Joomla 4 version of Fabrik), fixing significant bugs or are paid for developing specific new functionality and (of course) providing limited support to those who pay for it.

There is a little time left over for the Fabrikar staff to provide very limited support to community users who don't pay for support.

Which leaves very little / no time available for producing exceptional documentation.

My own personal opinions (and I should stress that I am not on the Fabrikar staff but rather just a community member - and these are my personal opinions and not Fabrikar's) are:

1. That in return for getting the use of the Fabrik software (which has literally tens of man years of development time invested) for free, the community needs to contribute a whole lot more than they currently do - to take support workload off the Fabrikar staff and to give the time to e.g. improve the documentation. Perhaps contributing 10% of the time spent on development to this might be a reasonable objective. If the community did this, and gave their time to create the comprehensive documentation (that they wished already existed) based on what they had learned from experimentation and the school of hard knocks and getting support from other's who can point you in the right direction, then in the end we might have complete documentation that helps people (like you) to use Fabrik for "big projects".

2. That when people use Fabrik for a commercial project, or for paid development, that they subscribe to a support contract to help fund the ongoing support - because this is a very small percentage of the benefits that will be gained or the other costs that are going to be incurred. (Note: Fabrik is open source, which means that no one is going to force you to pay to use a copy - this is a moral position, not a legal one.)

If more people did this, it would help put Fabrik support on a much sounder footing and benefit everyone.