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Better Categorization of Forum Topics

Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2013 2:22 pm
by shan
Browsing through the forum, there seems to be some overlap in topics. It was difficult for me to figure where to make a post, so I took a crack at arrange topics as I saw through the Forum. IMHO, a better structure around content would help make this forum more useful.

First crack at organization, please tweak to your likings

FAQ (topics below)
> How to configure Timezone
> Cloud computing
> Payment gateway
> Guest Checkout
>

Support (categories below)
> Customization support
> Feature enhancement support
> Technical feature support (inclusion of new API, new authentication methods)

Bug reports may be better served in Jira

Platform feature request
> new functional behaviors. Muti tenancy, social wallet, bread crumb navigation

Admin console feature request
> admin console feature request - i.e. multiple category management.

Re: Better Categorization of Forum Topics

Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2013 2:23 pm
by shan
Generally speaking, Users forum and Developers Forum separation may also help :)

Re: Better Categorization of Forum Topics

Posted: Tue Jun 04, 2013 3:30 pm
by phillipuniverse
Hey Shan, thanks a bunch for posting. We are in the midst of completely overhauling our forums, and switching over to Zendesk. This move will likely take place in the next couple of weeks.

In that same vein, we will also be restructuring our forum to better serve users and introducing much better organization. I agree, the current organization is a little difficult to follow and know where to make a post. Frankly, part of the reason it has stayed like this for a while is because most of the people that are answering posts (like me) just go to the 'Active Topics' view and answer things that need new replies from there. Since this is just a straight list of topics, I don't normally look at the tree structure.

Still, we know it's an issue and we are in the midst of refactoring things like this as well as our bug tracking (retiring Jira, moving to all GitHub issues so that it's consolidated).

I do like parts of your category structure there. The final structure will look pretty close to that. One comment I would make is the FAQ section should really be a documentation item (as in, a page hosted on http://docs.broadleafcommerce.org) rather than making a separate forum topic for it.

Thanks for taking the time to suggesting how to make Broadleaf better!