Please give me access to the joomla wiki

[Lukas Meier]

I have sent an e-mail over a month ago, I posted in the forums as well.

This is my last attempt. It really seems impossible to "get involved". What a shame.

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=303&t=830881

I am doing many tutorials and read much about joomla, I want to fix the horrible documentation or outdated files, but I cannot. If you wait another one or two months, I am probably done reading tutorials any ways. So if you give me Wiki change rights right now, I could still improve a lot your documentation.

cheers

lukas

[Chad Windnagle]

HI Lukas:

Thanks for trying to get involved. What part of the wiki isn't working for you?

http://docs.joomla.org/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Main+Page

You should be able to create an account and begin editing pages. Are you getting errors or something?

Regards,
Chad Windnagle

lukas

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[Mark Dexter]

Hi Lukas. Did you see this page? http://docs.joomla.org/JDOC:How_to_Contribute_to_Joomla!_Documentation

Click the link under Create a User Account. Good luck, and thanks for helping.

Mark Dexter

lukas

[Tom Hutchison]

Hi Lukas

Thanks for being persistent, I'm sorry been having so many problems. To whom did you send an email too? Are you saying to this list? 

I think Chad and Mark covered the basics with some links, you will have to create your own account, then confirm your email address. After this you can login with editing privileges.

On the 'how to contribute page' which Mark provided a link, you'll find a hyperlink to our category page with all wiki pages in need of some type of assistance. Even if the pages you want to improve are not on this category page, please feel free to appropriately improve them. Here's the link to where to start first.  

http://docs.joomla.org/JDOC:How_to_Contribute_to_Joomla!_Documentation#What_Should_I_Do_First.3F

Any questions just post back to this mail list or you can contact me directly via my docs talk page. 

Thanks

Tom Hutchison

[Lukas Meier]

Thanks a lot for the help. When I created the wiki account, like a month ago, I didn't know the "How to get involved" article. 

Now almost a month later I somehow assumed you cannot have an account unless you confirmed your e-mail. It just is like that everywhere where not confirming your e-mail turns out to be a show stopper, no?

Well I didn't confirm my e-mail.... *sigh*

I was originally writing to someone in the user interface team, because I spent roughly half a day having to figure out by myself that the button which says install in the extension manager is not behaving the same. I was following a hello world tutorial of a module. E.g. when you discover a new extension and then install it, it is very different from the zip upload and install (no sql executed, dont ask me what else not). But that was left out in the tutorial. I was working locally, why the heck should I create a zip and upload it to my server? i was always discovering obviously. I mean, that's really what every developer would do.

I googled for quite a bit, thought I had wrong folders etc. only because the gui is leading you into thinking that install is install. I am sure others can spend half a day on stuff like that, it should be renamed in the UI, imho thats better than writing in each tutorial that installing is not discover and install.

But the UI guy never responded.

Well anyways, I see what I can do with the wiki


Thanks guys!

[Chad Windnagle]

Hi Lukas:

I just want to thank you for spending the extra energy to get involved. It shouldn't be this frustrating! 

I don't know who you were talking too, but everyone in Joomla are volunteers so sometimes life gets in the way, we change jobs, etc.. It's probably best to get involved here on the mailing list so we can all pitch in giving you a hand. That way when one of us needs to take a break, someone else is there to pick up the slack. 

Anyway - I hope you're able to get rolling now! Welcome to the community, I hope you'll love it here as much as I do!

Regards,
Chad Windnagle

[Tom Hutchison]

Hi Lukas,

I'm glad you have it all sorted out and I see you are editing pages now. That's great! Thanks for getting involved and helping with documentation.

Can I ask you to take a moment in order to help the Docs Team understand what happen, how to prevent it from happening in the future, and improve new user registrations? If you could please clarify a few thing below?

On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Lukas Meier <lukas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks a lot for the help. When I created the wiki account, like a month ago, I didn't know the "How to get involved" article. 

 

There are 3 links on the home page to the 'How to get involved' article. I am guessing from your note above, they were not apparent enough? I've made a small change, is the link to this article now noticeable on the home page?

 

Now almost a month later I somehow assumed you cannot have an account unless you confirmed your e-mail. It just is like that everywhere where not confirming your e-mail turns out to be a show stopper, no?

 

In a word, yes. You must confirm your email to edit pages. Perhaps our policies page needs to be more prominent? Confirming an email is to aid in prevention of spam bot registration and spam bot edits. I have made some changes to the Create Account page. Now when a user creates a new account, they will see:

If you do not have account, you can register for one below. By creating an account, you agree you have read the Joomla! Docs Wiki policy and will abide by these rules. Thank you for taking the first steps for helping with our documentation. Once your user account is created and your email address is confirmed, you should read our getting starting article, How to Contribute to Joomla! Documentation.

I have also improved the confirmation email. I will post it separately.

 

Well I didn't confirm my e-mail.... *sigh*

 

Why not? When you edit a page without a confirmed email, there is a message which will display above the top of the editor. Reads something along the lines of (paraphrasing)... you don't have permission, must be a member of the user's group: emailconfirmed. I did a test account creation and I can see the message noting this. Was this message missing for you?

 

But the UI guy never responded.

Sorry about that, yes they should have responded but we are all volunteers and sometimes life gets in the way. 

What can we do to make it easier to get help? The forum was a great place to start, but they should have sent you to the docs mail list right away, which it looks like they did on your Dec 30th post. 

Again, moderators are volunteers too. Not an excuse, but looking over your forum posts, I see the one from end of November, another mid Dec on another topic, then the ones asking for docs help on Dec 30. It appears you were answered rather quickly (1 day) and we had you editing right away. The only other place I see docs referenced is the Nov 27 post:

not so important:

I wish I could do my part in improving the documentation, in case that's possible, feel free to add my user in the documentation wiki (same username, Toskan) to make it possible to make edits. Because as of now, it is quite a bit confusing the user. What am I talking about?

 

This was mixed in with your question, Toskan is not a registered user on docs and you post shortly thereafter, you figured it out. Moderators and others could take this as never mind, I know what to do now. Would this be a fair assessment?

Thanks

Tom

[Lukas Meier]

Hi Tom

Good to have you around.

 

On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 8:22 PM, Lukas Meier <lukas...@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks a lot for the help. When I created the wiki account, like a month ago, I didn't know the "How to get involved" article. 

 

There are 3 links on the home page to the 'How to get involved' article. I am guessing from your note above, they were not apparent enough? I've made a small change, is the link to this article now noticeable on the home page?

Actually I think people who want to change a wiki article don't typically take the time to browse away from the wiki article, and go ahead to read an article on how to get involved. I saw something which annoyed me and wasted my time. So I wanted to fix it for the next person. So you are on a wiki page (it wasnt this article with the lack of crucial information, but i can't find it any more for the moment):

http://docs.joomla.org/J3.2:Creating_a_simple_module/Developing_a_Basic_Module

So you are there, you go ahead create an account. I just did it more carefully now. So you create an account, well NOW I see that there it is explicitly stated during the registration, that you need to manually confirm. But I didn't read this what, 3 sentence statement, and I guess others won't either. You probably lose the readers after the first half sentence because they think this is regular registration talk. "Valid e-mail, yes yes right, send me your spam."

So you add whatever e-mail, I entered not my primary e-mail.

You click register and bam: big screen "Login successful"

This is when I thought I had actually a valid account. This tricked me into thinking it. I am logged in, can log out, whatever. I registered in maybe what, 300 sites in my life? And this is the first page which gives you, lets call it a hovering account? I am sure there must be some deeper reasoning why you are allowing users without valid e-mails.

 

Well I didn't confirm my e-mail.... *sigh*

 

Why not? When you edit a page without a confirmed email, there is a message which will display above the top of the editor. Reads something along the lines of (paraphrasing)... you don't have permission, must be a member of the user's group: emailconfirmed. I did a test account creation and I can see the message noting this. Was this message missing for you?

Well I honestly don't know what you are talking about. 

http://docs.joomla.org/J3.2:Creating_a_simple_module/Developing_a_Basic_Module

I am there, there is the drop down lacking the edit. 

You lost me there, I slammed on the table, thinking that I obviously need someone to manually give me privileges.

I have been working with usability for a while for the last company I worked for. I found it interesting and read an interesting book about it. Generally you can say, text wont get read. That's reality, you have to live with that. You are there to fill out a form to get the login, you filled out 100s forms like that, you won't read the small prints next to the e-mail field. Nor will users read your confirmation text. 

As well it is important to avoid noise on your webpage. For example your get involved link, which is big, but very noisy on your main page is an example how it not should be imho.

The menu is very nicely structured, the users realize, okay this is the menu, this is the title of the menu items 'Connect' Support ' Read', only the get involved link is different accompanied by the text

"Joomla is an open source project and contributions from the community are essential to its growth and success. Anyone can contribute on any level, even newcomers can contribute to Joomla."

This text is noise that makes people ignore the whole link. If you want to make advertisement  for contribution, this should be done at a different place, certainly not in a menu where users expect a menu.

But: the link is not that bad. When I was looking for it, I finally found it. So unlike the E-mail confirmation, this is no show stopper.

Happy new year btw! :-) Keep it up

Cheers

Lukas