Portal 2.6.1 Quickstart

[cdelashmutt]

I'd like to suggest some additional items for the 2.6.1 quickstart to help highlight some of the new features of 2.6 that we couldn't get into the 2.6 guide release.

I think that personalization should have a section in the guide. We should probably walk through a user cloning a page, and modifying it. Also, we should probably show the new wizard for adding content to a page, since that does simplify the whole process. This may replace the existing manual process that we currently show in the guide.

I don't want to "bloat" the quickstart guide, so I think the length is probably about right for it right now. What are everyone else's thoughts about adding the above sort of material to the guide? Maybe there are other things that folks are looking for as well?

[theute]

User personalization should be covered, but maybe more valuable would be basic portal customization. (Exemple: How do i change the logo, header or footer, not something that leads to recreate a whole theme but something simple). It should also point to the reference guide for "advanced" customization.

The new wizard should be there but probably not replace the manual process since you cannot pick a CMS content or Google widget yet.

The risk of "bloating" is real, we should be able to add content and still define some kind of path through it (by skipping some sections). Maybe by having a "pre-required chapters" section on each chapter.

Security is missing from the doc, we should explain how to restrict access to a page or window.

So here is an idea that i through away. Maybe we should reorganize the doco as a set of tutorials (with some chapters 'dependencies') each tutorial would have a clearly defined goal that makes sense as a whole (creating an instance is not end-user oriented, adding a window on a page is).
Each tutorial could end with a section explaining how to go from that little step to something wider. (If you know how to secure a page, you know how to secure a portal)

Exemple:
- Tutorial 0: Basic concepts
- Tutorial 1: Adding a window on a page
Pre-requisite: Tutorial 0
- Tutorial 2: Deploying a new portlet
Pre-requisite: Tutorial 0
Pre-requisite: Tutorial 1
- Tutorial 3: Securing a page
Pre-requisite: Tutorial 0
- Tutorial 4: Changing the header and footer
Pre-requisite: Tutorial 0
- Tutorial 5: Managing users and roles
Pre-requisite: Tutorial 0
- Tutorial 6: ...

I'm not sure myself if it is a good idea.

[claprun]

Hmm, the task-oriented approach could be a good idea. We could have the user perspective at the beginning and an under-the-cover look at what's going on at the end. If we can find a good set of tasks that cover everything we want to talk about, we could probably merge all the different guides together and save us some trouble down the road by avoiding duplicate content.
However, this would probably be a major undertaking. As it is, I'd already merge the quickstart and user guides using this approach since there is a lot of overlap. Moreover, the user guide is not that interesting as it is since it doesn't really go much above where to click... So the approach of showing how to do something then explaining what we just did could be a good one.

[theute]

The user guide should probably be the Help portlet mode. It should explains all the features instead of being task-oriented.