Precisely!

What's the saying -- you give a person a fish, they eat for a day. You teach them how to fish, and they eat for a lifetime?

Tutorials are something like that. With the proper explanations, they can teach how to do the work in general, rather than just how to do that particular problem.

As for the Forums - they do have the potential to handle this, but again, they tend to get caught up in minutae of specific problems related to specific examples. I haven't really seen any part of the Forum that addresses the underlying issues in a methodical or comprehensive way. (Or am I just not looking in the right places?) Right now, it seems to be mostly ad hoc, and is not too easy to access advice for specific types of problems, particularly if you don't even know how to formulate the question.

Some suggested topics might include:

1) An Index that helps access the information already available a little more readily. E.g., I stumbled onto the fact that the "Store" sample was about Chained Processes. (Unfortunately, it's not as comprehensive as I would like. I've had to examine the code at length to try and extrapolate how to apply it to my own processes, and I'm not even sure it's the right process to use. Still, I felt lucky to find it at all. But I digress.) While there is clearly some effort to organize the Forums into logical headings, it's still difficult to find answers, even to questions that have been discussed at length in numerous different threads.

2) Types of processes available (e.g., Chained, Compound Gateways, etc.), when and why to use them (or when not to use them), and what elements need to be included. (Similar to the format followed in "Designing Processes with People Activities", but with a little more explication for non-techies.) A more in-depth prologue in the tutorials, with an index of key words and topics would go a long way to achieving this objective.

In line with this, I sometimes have difficulty translating from the BPMN specification to the BPMS execution. Some of these elements I just described would help make that transition from theory to reality a little easier.

3) Common error messages - what they mean, what causes them, and how to fix them.

It also seems to me that in your reading over of people's geronimo logs, you must be coming across the same problems over and over. Again, in searching through the Forums, I find ad hoc examples of what I'm looking for, but they're not organized in a way that makes it easy to access. I'm thinking of something along the lines of an FAQ, but a little more formal and organized.

Hope these comments help! And if I'm missing work that you guys have already put out there, please let me know. I'm not a big fan of re-inventing the wheel, if I can help it.

Thanks.

cgk

This is really great feedback.
We are currently brainstorming about how we should enhance the user experience thanks to the community website and any idea is welcome!

If you want to continue the discussion, I suggest you open a topic in the Forum that addresses the web site usability.

Also feel free to let us know if you wish to contribute in any way.

Best Regards,

Arnaud