Frustrated

[Doped_Wizard]

No before I start complaining I want to say that withe the software itself and the support as far as setup and most of the troubleshooting goes I have been very happy.

But...

I have been playing around with drupal for quiet some time now because I want to setup a website alongside my forum. Now Drupal 8 is out and I was thinking hey why not give pages a  shot before you invest more time into drupal. Well its becoming very frustrating as there seems to be absoulutley no documentation for variables and templates etc. It would really take away a lot of issues if I could build my page with pages but with no documentation and me as someone who usually has to try to read stuff up as I go it is very frustrating indeed.

[Lindy]

What specifically are you looking for? Have you seen this?

[Doped_Wizard]

@Lindy Yes I have thank you. The Problem is I want to create custom templates as I want my Frontpage to look like a website and less like ipboard. I just do not know how to a) customize the output of the feed. and b) what variables I can use.

As an example  feed  block uses

Quote

$topics, $title, $orientation='vertical'

as variables... where are these defined and how do i drill down to get to just certain output I need example topics as that seems to include date, user, etc....

What If I just want the creation date but nothing else from a topic?

If I have overlooked a guide to this I am sorry and would appreciate if you point me to it.

Otherwise I hope you understand now what I am exactly looking for

Thank you for your time.

[jaeitee]

1 hour ago, Doped_Wizard said:

b) what variables I can use.

I've been associated with two projects now, Pages is powerful enough to achieve precisely what those projects were aiming for.  However due to complete lack of documentation ( and this is an absolute joke 9 months on https://community.invisionpower.com/4guides/suite-applications/pages/ ) both those projects went with other platforms.  A shame because what they were aiming for we could of re-purposed that code on more IPS deployments.  Instead it makes it way into another ecosystem.

Lack of Pages code examples, but more importantly lack of any thorough variables database on Pages is by far the most frustrating aspect I find.  It's well overdue for IPS to invest in to Pages Documentation, and not like it's an after-thought or something they'll do as a "favour."  IPS is very quick to point out how "customisable" pages is, but when you open a ticket they advise you to ask in the forum.  They then rely on individuals like Ralf to provide free support for a product they've purposefully under-invested in the documentation for.

@Lindy I love the IPS suite, it's brilliant.  I give IPS "likes" and "kudos" for many areas, as it's truely a great product with a great team behind it.  However the lack of documentation regarding Pages 9 months after release, appalling effort.  

[bradl]

Documentation is part of the product. It is not an afterthought, bonus, option, extra, collateral, training wheel, dingleberry, burden, or unfortunate by-product of the development process. Believe it or don't. I suspect most customers believe it.

As an amateur, I live or die by working code examples … with enough context to understand where they can or cannot be used. (Paste this code in a custom html block and it will choke; paste this code into a custom plugin block and it will sparkle.)

The guides are showing a lot of promise. The sample projects are immensely useful. Please give documentation an equal leg on the stool alongside features, performance, and stability.