[TYPO3-project-formidable] Formidable : a beginners point of view

[Rob De Vries]

Hey Formidable boys and girls,

first: congratulations to Ameos: for me, formidable is the most amazing 
ext. I've seen in a while. You have my vote for the ext. of the year.



It is now more than a week that I'm using formidable and I would like to 
share my experiences as a beginner.

Formidable is for me a very typicale T3 'application'. It keeps on 
amazing me how versatile it is, even for a non programmer like me, but 
it has also a very steep lurning curve.

One of the reasons, and this is no complain, is the lack of good 
documentation. I know this is a delicate subject and that Ameos is 
working on this (there is the wiki, the knowledge base, the example 
extensions and the reference documention) but still, it seems to me that 
it just reflects only a tiny amount of the possebilities of Formidable.

For me, the demo extensions were the most usefull to see how things 
work. I'm the type of guy who starts trying things to see what it gives 
and after it works, I get an understanding why it works. "Monky see, 
monky do" approche.
I guess this counts for most of us, as I can tell of the questions in 
this list.

So, for a beginner, the most usefull things to get a good boost-start 
would be, and I qoute: documentlets.
A list of snippets on how to do this or that. This could be very simpel 
tasks like: how to send an email after filling out a form (how to style 
the output of a mail) how to get information displayd on a page (not 
only the list, but also a 'single' view), how to get information of 
something based on a front-end user, etc ... For most of you very simple 
things, for a beginner like me, not that obvious.

My idea of these snippets is very simple, they don't even need to be 
'working' examples as the demo ext. just a list of some examples (as in 
the documentation). And we already have a very nice place for this: the 
wiki.
It will take a very tiny amount of time to place your own 'snippet' in 
the wiki, It even don't need alot of explaining, just your code example 
and a comment line or two will do.
If this 'snippet' base grow, it will help us all tremendously, the more 
examples, the less we all need to look for a sollution, the faster our 
own productions will go and the more new people will start to use 
formidable (who, in their turn will add more snippets, that will atract 
more new people ... )


For now, i'll keep on figuring things out with the information we have.
Formidable is worth all the extra time trying, failing and trying back 
agian.

tnx for your time reading this.

Rob


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