Jan Olsmar:
I have never said and so far never felt that everything is "all good".  I am a realist.  I use the method(s) available that suit my needs.  While I realize that there are many areas in DNN that could be improved, I also bring to mind why they are in their current state, and what might need to be done to make them better.  I have simply not had any problems using my approach of using Google as a tool to get answers to my questions (yet).  Is that what we should be doing?  Maybe.  Maybe not. 

That being said, I have yet to hear or read anyone else praising the state of documentation in the DNN project.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.  And the posts thusfar to this thread that haven't been negative have simply attempted to help all that might read this thread understand what they are doing to help themselves be successful in finding support and answers. 

If you're going to supply a link to another site that has "great documentation", why not also supply information about how you think we could achieve something similar?  On an aside, I would say that it is possible to have a better documentation resource than that.  I wasn't all that impressed.  We have more resources here: 

• http://www.dotnetnuke.com/tabid/787/default.aspx (which links to the proceeding pages)
• http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Support/Documentation/DownloadableFiles/tabid/478/Default.aspx
• http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Support/Documentation/BooksandTrainingVideos/tabid/810/Default.aspx
• http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Support/Documentation/LearningResources/tabid/535/Default.aspx

Oliver Hine:
I love how Oliver is thinking outside of the box and coming up with possible solutions.  And perhaps a community initiative is necessary to make the documentation woes go away.  But the problem of having community member contribute to this cause remains.  I am all for it.  Just how does one make it happen?  I know that I am unfortunately not one that could contribute to that right now, but I applaud anyone who takes the open source view and applies it to such an initiative. 

Jan Olsmar: 
{big grins}  I think we are finally beginning to reach some common ground.

I agree that the documentation must be better for paying customers, and from what I know, they are fully aware that documentation needs to be better for the commercial initiative.  I do know that they have plans that specifically involve the commercial front.  What those plans are can only speculated on at this point.  I do think that if I were a paying customer to the DNN platform, I would expect to have more at my disposal than what the non-paying community members already have.  Which is the docs that we're already talking about.  I would expect to have some "customer only" reference materials.

I believe that the strong leadership is in place already.  We wouldn't have made it this far without it.  They wouldn't have been able to secure funding without it.  In short, the DNN site, project, and ecosystem wouldn't exist today if the strong leadership didn't exist.  Much less, documentation.  That being said, strong leadership behind the documentation could indeed be a great first step.  Admittedly, I do not know for sure who is behind the current documentation efforts though.  Perhaps the leadership is there, but that person or persons do not have enough time right now.  Documentation is a timely thing to do, and do well.

All,

just in case people weren't aware, wiki-based documentation has been on the cards for a long time. I discussed this at both of the openforce conferences this year (including during the Q&A session), and have mentioned it on a number of forum posts (such as http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/118/threadid/276918/scope/posts/threadpage/2/Default.aspx) , but it seems that noone on this thread was aware of it (core team members excluded naturally), so thought I'd post to give a little background.

I've long been a proponent of a wiki on dotnetnuke.com (Oliver, I appreciate what you're trying to do with your wiki, but without wanting to seem overly negative, there have been 3/4 similar efforts over the years which have met with similar lack of success, I guess as people expect/want a wiki to hang off dotnetnuke.com). In fact over a year ago , we piloted the core wiki on dotnetnuke.com to run it through it's paces, and see if it was fit for what we needed  i.e. a resource that the community could add to. The wiki itself didn't end up with too much content as only a few of the core members such as Sebastian that regularly reply to forum posts added content, though one or two pieces were added by people such as Joe after they'd added new features to dotnetnuke, so it had some value. However, the core wiki itself was/is not mature enough for our purposes. The primary problem was that it didn't support rollbacks so it would be trivial for hackers/unhelp users to delete/ruin content.

I began to evaluate a number of asp.net based wikis, and liked the look of screwturn wiki, as it had all the features we need, plus others such as transclusions, delegated authorization and discussions that we could leverage. It also has support for an authentication provider model, which is important to allow us to leverage the existing dotnetnuke.com users/roles. However, the problem here is one of time/effort - I simply have not had the time( having to earn money to pay the bills has precedence), but it's on the cards.

One thing to note about a wiki as a documentation source, is that not everyone wants to post to a wiki. Wiki's tend to be very altruistic, as unless someone clicks into an article history, then content has no "owner" (and therefore little credit). Many people create quality content for dotnetnuke, but want to reap benefits from it by posting it on their own website e.g. google adword revenue, community credit, building a reputation (for mvp/business) or other reasons, so are likely to be reluctant to post their content on a core wiki.  The core documentation project mentioned here http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2031/DNN-Days-of-Yore-or-how-massive-DotNetNuke-is-becoming.aspx will be an attempt to capture this documentation sources but allow the content creators to still gain their benefits i.e. it's an index of documentation but the content still lives where the content owner wants it to do.

Cathal