[Typo3] Helping new users - was [menu item image gets cut off or truncated]

[Vincent]

On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 12:33:59AM -0500, Vincent wrote:
> Ok. I finally figured out why the letter spacing had no effect.  The
> styles.gmenu_layer.green template only applies if you are using
> "template; GREEN".  As a newbie, I still have not found any docs that
> make that clear.  I suspected it and finally noticed in the Template
> Analyzer that styles.gmenu_layer.gmenu_layer got automatically included
> when I used "template; GREEN".  
> 
> I still have not found any documentation that explains the use of the
> static templates very well.  For example, which ones should be manually
> selected?  Apparently the appropriate "styles.xxx" gets included based
> on the template selection.  Does this apply to all other static
> templates in the list?  In other words, are the "template; xxx"
> templates the only ones that should be manually selected?  If not, is
> there a document that tells me which ones can be?  I found the "Details
> of Static Templates" document, but it just lists the source code for
> each of the templates.

I finally found most of my answers to these questions.

I have been watching discussions indicating that the typo3 community
would like to see typo3 become better known and in more wide spread use.
Especially in countries such as the US, which is where I am.

Typo3 is a wonderful package and it deserves to be more wide spread.
However, you people do not seem to be trying very hard to help new users
come aboard.  Not one experienced person came forward to help with these
questions.  It would have only taken a couple minutes to direct me to
the "TypoScript By Example > Standard templates > static_template"
section of the documentation.  That answered most of these questions.
But it was days before I discovered it on my own after asking the
questions on the mailing list.

When it does not appear that the community is willing to spend 2 or
3 minutes to save a newbie days, it makes one concerned that they are
going to be ignored and completely on their own if they choose typo3 and
have a show stopping problem that they cannot solve on their own.

Another example of why new users are not as attracted to typo3 (speaking
for myself initially).

I look at at other cms sites and most of them have links to themes and
templates to help new users get started more easily.  One of the cms
packages I recently evaluated, Xaraya, is even having a theme
competition to build up their collection of themes that they can offer
their users.  Typo3, so far as I can tell, is the most powerful cms of
all of them for creating themes, yet there are no links to any kind of
a theme page with screen shots that I have found on the typo3 site.  I am
surprised by this considering how much longer typo3 has been around.

Because of this, I almost did not give typo3 enough of a chance to know
that it was so much more powerful and feature rich than the other cms
packages I have found.  If I had not already spent substantual time on
typo3, I would have likely chosen something like xaraya.

So far, I have only found one site that offers typo3 templates with
screen shots, and it is a church.  Hah!  go figure.

http://webempoweredchurch.com/gettingstarted/templates/

The official typo3 site really should have something like this.