9

This is from the 7 essential meta questions and kind of follows Nuno's question: How strict should we be on the Q&A format?

So what type of questions do we want and which don't we want? Do we need a blurb explaining what Tridion is?

Edited as per Robert's suggestion to be an actual question, see my answer for what I suggested.

12
  • 1
    Not to be dense but what do you mean by customer specific queries?
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 19, 2013 at 22:46
  • 2
    We have a lot of Tridion-related infrastructure on StackExchange (quite a few on StackOverflow, even). Should we allow them here?
    – Alvin Reyes
    Feb 19, 2013 at 22:48
  • Good question - I mean questions that might contain information about custom internal systems or confidential information relating to a customers implementation. I will edit to make it better..
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Feb 19, 2013 at 22:48
  • @AlvinReyes I'll promote that up. I was thinking more about general infrastructure queries.
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Feb 19, 2013 at 22:49
  • 2
    @RobStevenson-Leggett You should rework this question to be an actual question, and provide your thoughts (answer) as actual answers. That's the only way folks can contribute their thoughts and let the other answers/vetting/voting/commenting work their community magic.
    – Robert Cartaino
    Feb 20, 2013 at 2:16
  • So I've updated my answer to reflect what Anna Lear said about only being able to update the 'What kind of questions can I ask here?' section of the FAQ and to include points brought up in other answers and comments.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 27, 2013 at 3:01
  • I've flagged this question as needs moderator attention and have asked our moderators if they would be so kind as to update the FAQ for us.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Mar 7, 2013 at 20:14
  • Just a note for everyone, our community moderators have declined to update the FAQ at this time for the following reason: 'Since we are not domain experts, this type of thing is best left as a first order of business once the pro tems are appointed.'
    – Glenn Stevens
    Mar 11, 2013 at 18:53
  • Do you think I should "un-accept" the answer until we do the update?
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Mar 12, 2013 at 13:54
  • Given it has been a month+ since conversation on this question ended, do you think we should re-open this question up before modifying the FAQ or should go ahead, make the changes and then adjust the FAQ as time goes by and the community continues to evolve?
    – Glenn Stevens
    Apr 16, 2013 at 14:16
  • 1
    I think we should just do it and then ask a separate question saying "Is everyone OK with the FAQ?"
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Apr 16, 2013 at 14:29
  • Gone ahead and actioned it.
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Apr 16, 2013 at 14:51

7 Answers 7

Reset to default
10

I do not think we need a blurb explaining what Tridion is at the top of the FAQ as people who are part of the Tridion community (and hence this site's audience) will already know what Tridion is.

Borrowing from the FAQ's of several other SE sites, the other answers to this question and the comments on those questions here is what I think makes sense:

What kind of questions can I ask here?

Tridion - Stack Exchange is your source of expert answers for project managers, developers, testers, architects, administrators, and businesses using or thinking about using the Tridion CMS

If your question is about SDL Tridion and generally covers...

  • Programming related to the Tridion API and associated projects
  • Add-ons for Tridion, like Experience Manager, Audience Manager and Community Builder
  • Extending Tridion
  • Integrating Tridion with other projects
  • Compatibility
  • Content Modeling, Architecture and Blueprinting
  • Infrastructure requirements, Scalability or High-Availability configurations
  • Server administration/configuration questions relating to Tridion and associated projects

And it is not about...

  • Comparing Tridion with other CMS products
  • General programming topics
  • General server administration
  • Implementation-specific topics like
    • How do I insert a carousel on this page?
    • How do I update my navigation/sitemap?
    • Where should I create content for the French site?
  • Tridion pricing, careers, job postings, or referrals for implementation consultants

… then you’re in the right place to ask your question!

Questions are generally acceptable as long as they require specific Tridion expertise to be answered. Does the answer change if you use WordPress or Drupal instead of Tridion? If so, the question is on-topic for Tridion Stack Exchange.

You should avoid asking implementation-specific questions. If your question applies only to your company's Tridion solution, it cannot be reliably answered by the wider Tridion community. Examples of questions likely to be implementation-specific include those relating to your particular Blueprint, Schemas, Component or Page Templates.

Your questions should not contain information identifying specific Customers, userIDs, servernames, passwords etc. and will be quickly edited or closed by the community to remove such information.

Issues like bug reporting, feature requests, generalized discussions, specific customer support issues do not fit into this site's Q&A model, and will be quickly closed by the community.

Please look around to see if your question has been asked before. It’s also OK to ask and answer your own question.

16
  • I am still somewhat on the fence in my own thoughts on whether specific add-ons should be listed as the available Tridion add-ons is bound to change over time and my understanding from discussions on other SE Meta sites is that once created, FAQ's for SE sites are very seldomly updated.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 20, 2013 at 3:45
  • I think this is getting closer!
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Feb 20, 2013 at 11:21
  • 2
    @RobertCartiano mentioned this useful Q&A in another meta question as well: "...issues like bug reporting, feature requests, generalized discussions, and specific customer support issues do not fit into our Q&A model, and will be quickly closed by the community." Especially the not mentioning specific customer names and cases seems to be important to. A matter of privacy I guess...
    – Hendrik Beenker
    Feb 20, 2013 at 15:33
  • +1. "Content Modeling" would be a better, more general term for "Schema Design." Consider striking "Tridion" from "contact SDL Tridion." It should simply be SDL or the Division (SDL Content Management Technologies).
    – Alvin Reyes
    Feb 20, 2013 at 17:37
  • I doubt anyone would ask for recommendations for Tridion implementation consultants here (I hope not!), but maybe we could generalize the point to "questions about Tridion careers, job postings, or referrals for implementation consultants?"
    – Alvin Reyes
    Feb 20, 2013 at 17:39
  • @AlvinReyes I think both your suggestions make sense. I'll edit my answer a little later today to include them.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 20, 2013 at 20:48
  • @Hendrik Do you see the community closing questions which mention specific customer names and cases? I guess in my case as we are the end Tridion user it doesn't seem like an issue to me but I can see where it would be to Tridion VAR's, Partners, Consultants etc. Unless of course the OP had the customer's permission in which case it would seem ok...
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 20, 2013 at 20:52
  • We've had a case in Stack Overflow where a question contained server names and passwords. It was closed within 2-3 minutes, edited and version-history-deleted. So yes, it does happen. Also, most of Tridion customers in North America are financial institutions, which tend to be secretive about anything they do and would probably not be happy if details of their super-complex workflow would be publicly available on a site like this
    – Nuno Linhares Mod
    Feb 20, 2013 at 22:09
  • I updated my answer to incorporate the feedback from @AlvinReyes @Hendrik and @Nuno. A question I have about my answer is I am sometimes using SDL Tridion and sometimes just Tridion. After the first use of SDL Tridion in the FAQ does everyone think it is ok to transition to using just Tridion ?
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 21, 2013 at 0:33
  • 1
    Customers, userID, servernames, etc should not be allowed and quickly edited out. Like @Nuno said, many big (financial) companies use Tridion. You don't want their security team to discover any identifiable information.
    – Hendrik Beenker
    Feb 21, 2013 at 9:00
  • For the name I tend to stick to Tridion. Since that is the product name this whole FAQ revolves around. But, maybe you can add a disclaimer in the top of the FAQ that "SDL Tridion" and "Tridion" mean the same thing and both can be used.
    – Hendrik Beenker
    Feb 21, 2013 at 9:06
  • 1
    @Hendrik I updated my answer further so the only mentions of 'SDL Tridion' are in the elevator pitch and in the intro line 'If your question is about Sdl Tridion and....' All of the other mentions I changed to just 'Tridion'. I also added a new paragraph (the 3rd one) under the 'What questions should I not ask here?' section to cover not including information identifying customers in your questions. Let me know what you think.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 21, 2013 at 10:50
  • The only section of the FAQ that's editable per site is the "What kind of questions can I ask here?", so some of your proposed changes here can't be done.
    – Adam Lear StaffMod
    Feb 22, 2013 at 21:03
  • I've accepted your answer as I think it contains everything we need.
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Mar 7, 2013 at 17:49
  • The question of avoiding specific company names comes under the general requirement for professionalism. In other words, if your relationship with a given customer would not allow you to mention them here, then don't do that. Beyond that, I don't see any specific reason from a trex perspective why customers shouldn't be mentioned. It doesn't harm the community here, even if it might not be a good idea in most cases.
    – Dominic Cronin
    May 4, 2013 at 18:34
5

This is a good start.

I would remove the windows versions, as that list will be outdated in a month or two. Maybe add "Add-ons for SDL Tridion provided by SDL, like Experience Manager, Audience Manager and Community Builder (UGC)" in the list of topics covered.

I would also add "Scalability and High-Availability configurations" right under "Infrastructure".

2
  • What about add-ons for SDL Tridion not provided by SDL?
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 20, 2013 at 3:43
  • Initially I thought: No, only SDL... then thought of the PowerTools. Edited answer.
    – Nuno Linhares Mod
    Feb 20, 2013 at 15:28
3

So I was thinking of:

Tridion - Stack Exchange is for SDL Tridion developers and administrators.

SDL Tridion is a Web Content Management software platform that supports both Java and .NET architectures by offering multiple public application programming interfaces (APIs) for both the J2EE and the .NET Frameworks.

The management platform runs on Microsoft Windows 2003/2008 whereas the publishing platform is platform-independent and support includes Microsoft, Unix, or Linux.

This website is for questions about:

  • Programming questions relating to the SDL Tridion API and associated projects
  • Extending SDL Tridion
  • Integrating SDL Tridion with other projects
  • Compatibility questions
  • Schema design
  • Blueprint questions
  • Infrastructure requirements questions
  • Server adminstration questions relating to SDL Tridon and associated projects

This website is not for questions about:

  • Comparison with other CMS products
  • Questions which contain information identifying a particular customer (these should go to SDL support)
  • General programming questions
  • General server administration questions
  • Pricing
3

How about editors?

I am not seeing any reference to editorial users so far. In my opinion, this Q&A site should also serve the people who create, edit and publish content and navigation in SDL Tridion. This is probably an even larger group than that of programmers/administrators.

6
  • Very good point.
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Feb 21, 2013 at 18:50
  • Not saying I disagree with Ashok but the potential issue with this is the editor Tridion experience/questions are likely to be highly specific to their organization’s Tridion implementation. The wordpress and Drupal SE sites seem to take two different tacks on this with wordpress having a very technology focused audience while Drupal extends their audience definition to include 'businesses using or thinking of using Drupal.' If we decide editors are part of the audience I think we'll need some additional bullets under the 'What kinds of questions should I not ask here' section of the FAQ.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 21, 2013 at 19:41
  • Can we at least include the content management organization or the business users that are part of implementation? These would be the power users and administrative (if not specifically administrator) users that determine requirements and guide implementations.
    – Alvin Reyes
    Feb 23, 2013 at 1:10
  • @Alvin do you think 'implementation professionals' covers the members of that team or should we be more explicit?
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 27, 2013 at 1:54
  • @AlvinReyes I updated my answer to reflect and audience of project managers, developers, testers, architects, administrators, and businesses do you think that covers it suitably well or does it need to be futher tweaked (and what do you think the tweaks should be?)
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 27, 2013 at 2:55
  • Perfect--"businesses" covers the non-technical roles.
    – Alvin Reyes
    Apr 21, 2013 at 19:04
3

"Can Tridion do this" type of questions

People considering Tridion CMS, are most likely to ask questions like, “I have these requirements. Will Tridion CMS be able to meet them?”. It will be good to clarify in the FAQ whether such questions are allowed. I am not saying that I lean one way or another - just that it will be good to clarify.

2

Contrary to Ashok's answer, I think we need to be careful about encouraging questions from content editors because - as has already been noted - this is likely to incite implementation-specific or unanswerable questions.

However, as it would be a positive thing to include content editors in the Tridion community, perhaps we should have an FAQ section that attempts to clarify this:

You should avoid asking questions that are implementation-specific. If your question applies only to your company's Tridion solution, it cannot be reliably answered by the wider Tridion community. Questions that are likely to be implementation-specific include those that relate to particular Schemas or Component Templates, as well as those relating to your particular Blueprint.

Questions such as the following are likely to be implementation-specific:

  • How do I insert a carousel on this page?
  • How do I update my navigation/sitemap?
  • Where should I create content for the French site?

Questions like the following relate to Tridion in general and should be okay:

  • How do I see on what pages a Component is used?
  • How do I stop formatting from being pasted into a Rich Text Field?

However, I can see a couple of potential pitfalls with encouraging questions from editors at all:

  • Many content editors will find it very difficult to draw a distinction between what is and isn't an implementation-specific question (even with guidelines and examples).
  • We may find that the plethora of technical questions scares content editors away.
  • Conversely, we may find that - as the base of content editors is larger than the base of developers and administrators - technical questions are drowned out by trivial questions from content editors and the site loses its appeal to Tridion professionals and "expert-level" users.
2
  • Good points Ant. +1
    – Rob Stevenson-Leggett
    Feb 24, 2013 at 18:33
  • I've updated my answer to include much of what you included in your answer (although I didn't include the examples of the two question in the 'should be okay' list.) Do you think I should work those questions in? One worry I have is the part of the FAQ we can modify seems to be getting pretty long compared to other SE sites and I do wonder how much of it people will actually read.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Feb 27, 2013 at 2:59
1

Can I get a developer/student version of SDL Tridion?

A: No, unless you are one of the following:

  • SDL Tridion Employee
  • SDL Tridion MVP
  • Employee of an SDL Tridion Partner
  • Employee of an SDL Tridion customer

This question seems to be popping up a lot

2
  • Do you think this should be included in the 'What Kind of Questions Can I ask Here?' section of the FAQ? That would seem like kind of a stretch to me.
    – Glenn Stevens
    Apr 16, 2013 at 14:14
  • I the the point on sales covers this; but it almost doesn't matter if it's in the FAQ--people will ask it anyways. ;-)
    – Alvin Reyes
    Apr 21, 2013 at 19:08

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