[opencms-dev] open letter -- How to learn OpenCMS

[Joachim Arrasz]

Hello,

> Likewise I have read the book, the docs, and have been reading the 
> email archives for a few months... we have implemented an OpenCMS 
> system but I can't say I feel particularly comfortable with the whole 
> experience. If the information exists (scattered) in the mailing 
> archives then that information needs to be taken out and put into 
> documentation. I would suggest to Alkacon, if they are paying 
> programmers to work on development, to also include a full time 
> tester/documenter or encourage more people to work on documentation or 
> something.

first you have to get the system run, then you can sepnd money to write 
documentation and test-systems ... i´m not sure, but Alkacon works 
surely with nearly the complete companies manpower on opencms. So other 
people can help to find issues, write more documentation to and so on. 
But always in java, the best documentation is Java-Doc and, if you 
encounter a problem, the code itself. It´s very easy to understand the 
code. Opencms is developed in a very clean and structured way.

If you can´t find the needed Class or code-snippet in the Code (yes it´s 
really a lot) then feel free to use a debugger and you will find the 
point very fast :-)

Then i will point your questions on www.opencms-forum.de. Today there 
are hundred and hundreds of posts on opencms-questions and answers and 
about 20 - 30 developers who try to help you with problems around 
opencms and jsp programming. The answertime is mostly under 12 hours.

>     For example, if you have a pointer to what an 'inclusion loop
>     error' is and how it is caused, that would be great. This one
>     comes up a lot (in my learning and in the mailing lists), but I
>     haven't found an explanation of what it's all about. Without that
>     understanding, I am not able to figure out how to address it, work
>     around it, live with it.
>
as Thomas showed you, just read a bit in the code. You will find your 
answer very fast.

Bye

Joachim Arrasz :-)