Documentation improvements & Feedback

   —   
Part of our reviewed documentation needs some feedback from you to make it even better.
Hi there,

We are always doing our best in fulfilling your wishes and recommendations. Since most of your feedback always targets the documentation, we extended our team of technical writers from a single one to three (with one more to go), to be able to cover more details in the documentation and also have resources to do periodical reviews.

The documentation on DevNet has already been updated with new version, and now is the time for you to provide us some feedback on it.

What was reviewed already?

Modules that were reviewed and what we believe is a final version of them (unless you provide us suggestions what should be added) are following: What has changed? (what was done during the review):

Here is a list of the main changes you should notice. There are some smaller ones, but not as important as these:
  • The overview is richer, and provides guide to most important topics
  • The documentation contains more links to related topics
  • Each module contains API examples of how to work with specific objects of such module (e.g. add member to a community group, create an avatar etc.), API examples are now provided with syntax highlighting
  • The documentation is now better tagged and uses more variants of object names in its text to provide better search functionality
Also, the context help is richer, and also provides links to the more detailed chapters in developer's guide. Here are the context help parts: What we expect from you?

The main part in the documentation review is always yours. The fact is that we have too experienced employees, which is great because we are always able to provide you excellent support and features, but it also has some side effects. Those are we are not able to identify the missing pieces from the beginner perspective, since when we read the documentation, everything is clear to us. The other thing is everybody may have different expectations.

That's where you can help us with your feedback, read the reviewed chapters, and let us know what  you are still missing in them. Only that way the documentation can be done so everybody likes it.

You should aswer the following questions to give us the most accurate feedback, always be specific:
  • What is still not clear or missing in the reviewed chapters?
  • Is the logical flow of the chapter correct, if not, how should it look like?
  • Is there enough API examples and are they clear? If not, which additional ones should be there or what should be changed?
  • Is the chapter positioned correctly? If not, where should it be located?
  • Can the chapters be found via search with keywords that you would typically use in search for this topic? If not, which ones are missing?
Put the feedback to the comments or send them to support@kentico.com (if you do not want others to see them). In my opinion, an open discussion is the best way how to iterate to a solution that everyone would like.

Looking forward to it! Your feedback is appreciated!

P.S.: Please do not review any other chapters than the ones mentioned above. Other chapters are now under review and there will be plenty of time to review them once we finish them.

Thank you

Share this article on   LinkedIn

Martin Hejtmanek

Hi, I am the CTO of Kentico and I will be constantly providing you the information about current development process and other interesting technical things you might want to know about Kentico.

Comments

Martin Hejtmanek commented on

Hi all, thanks for the feedback. Yes, please report anything suspicious to you, we may not be aware of this. Also, for the "real world examples", you are the ones living in that real world, dealing with client's requirements, we can only guess what are the specifics you might need and guessing more could just lead to enormous amount of useless examples. So let us know some specific situations that you need to cover, we will be more than happy to provide such information if we know what that is.

Thank you

aim commented on

Agree with the first comment about the documentation. For newbies to Kentico, we need some more real-world examples. Also, some of the KB articles could benefit from revisions. I've also spotted spelling and grammar areas in a number of help pages and articles. I realize that there's probably a bit of a language gap contributing to this. Should those be reported to Support also?

ctaleck IPAGlobal commented on

Now a comment on the actual documentation.

An improvement that could be make to this page:
http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html?displaying_avatars_in_transformations.htm

Add the actual code returned by the transformations. I know it is image tag, but seeing it would be most helpful.

Also, I don't see a list of all the AvatarInfo and AvatarInfoProvider methods available. I know you have that somewhere, but a link from the Avatar overview page to that list would be helpful.

ctaleck IPAGlobal commented on

I've always thought the documentation was very good for my needs. However, from a "beginners" perspective, I would like to see more tutorial type documentation. In other words, I just don't want to see the features "documented", but what is the best and proper way to implement them.

Some of the KB articles are a good start, but they always seem hastily written. Some of those topics could be expanded with the beginner in mind to make really good tutorials.

Keep up the good work.