On Organizing Tutorials

dotted

As helpful as a tutorial thread is, an organized web page would be immensely useful and much more so than a generic search via google.

TwistedTwigleg

I'm confused, where/what are you referring to?

If you mean here on the forums, I agree, but this wouldn't necessarily be easy (or straightforward) to implement as an automatic system, and creating a list manually would be a lot of work. Also, you can use the search feature on the forums and limit the category to "resources" or "tutorials" when searching, which should make it easier to find what you are looking for.

If you are meaning elsewhere, like on the Godot documentation for example, then I would suggest you bring it to their attention via GitHub or their preferred communication channel.

dotted

I am referring to the available tutorials from the forums and in general. If you know what keywords or tags to look for yeh, search is OK, if you've learned the tags etc, which is simply another layer grind and digging to find out -if- the information is available.

A page might be some work, as the selection would have to be curated, but the value of such a page is quite high. See Unity's site with curated tutorials organized and presented. It is simply a much more friendly way for people to find useful guides.

TwistedTwigleg

@dotted said: I am referring to the available tutorials from the forums and in general. If you know what keywords or tags to look for yeh, search is OK, if you've learned the tags etc, which is simply another layer grind and digging to find out -if- the information is available.

Ah, that makes sense. I do agree that visibility of tutorials/resources/etc can be challenging. Ideally, once I have time, I want to extend the search plugin to allow by searching by tag, which may make things a little easier.

A page might be some work, as the selection would have to be curated, but the value of such a page is quite high. See Unity's site with curated tutorials organized and presented. It is simply a much more friendly way for people to find useful guides.

While I do not disagree, I cannot see this happening with the forums right now. We are all community volunteers, and there is just not the resources (time, energy) to devote to something like this. Ideally, on the Godot documentation there would be a curated list of tutorials, and I believe something like this has been discussed in the Godot 4.0 documentation change. That should make things easier, though it will not necessarily help the forums, but forum users could make PRs to add their tutorials to the list on the documentation if/when that there is a list there.

dotted

I think the godot docs are not a definitive place for anything but tutorials maintained by contributors, because keeping track of external tutorials is the same job as doing it on the forums. Links can go dead, become irrelevant etc.

I have a separate question though, would it be possible to add a page for that kind of thing? By this I mean, is there a plugin for the forum itself that supports something like a 'media-list' with an image, caption and link or is that just a "that dog don't hunt" kind of thing for the forum itself?

TwistedTwigleg

@dotted said: I think the godot docs are not a definitive place for anything but tutorials maintained by contributors, because keeping track of external tutorials is the same job as doing it on the forums. Links can go dead, become irrelevant etc.

Indeed, but there are way more people who can chip in on the documentation than on the forums. As of right now, there's just five of us here on forum staff :smile:

I have a separate question though, would it be possible to add a page for that kind of thing? By this I mean, is there a plugin for the forum itself that supports something like a 'media-list' with an image, caption and link or is that just a "that dog don't hunt" kind of thing for the forum itself?

It might be possible, I have not really looked into it to be honest. It would probably have to be a mirror of the forums than a separate page though, as I imagine any plugin that does it would take over the categories/recent-discussions page, but I'm just guessing. Could be something to look into though!

dotted

I was thinking something along the lines of what you can get in word press, where it's not much trouble to setup a 'static' page of links to other content in the site, posts, or external links (IIRC they can be referred to symbolically, like "my-favorite-cat-link").

The other thing to consider is docs tend to be updated only on releases. Valid tutorials are a bit more fluid, so probably some other solution would be better.

Calinou

This is precisely what's being discussed in this GitHub issue :)

dotted

cool. thanks

Megalomaniak

I can see how it could be possible in theory at least, to create a plugin that would take topics with a tag and create a page out of them.

We can also give a category on the forums a custom css class and create a different css rule-set for the content in that category to theme it differently, but I'm not clear on what exactly you have in mind to be hones. Maybe some mock-up images might help.

In as far as topic hero images go(as they are called in vanilla) the hero image plugin will become part of the default feature-set in vanilla 4.0 as far as I'm aware. That would be the first image in a topic would be the topics icon on the topics listing page.

dotted

The basic presentation is a tiled layout as exemplified here. In fact the community landing page is an [example](http:// "example") of it. What's missing is filtering features, such as by-topic and sub-topic, 'level' as in beginner thru advanced. A default page of curated 'top picks' especially for introductory stuff might be really useful.

It would be very nice if there was a suitable plugin or means to assemble functionality from plugins.

While most things can be found via Google, its general results page is a tad lacking and while the tutorial forum topic is a good resource, it suffers from the same issues. I don't know if the community itself can help curate new additions and flag those that become out of date, but it's nice to image that would work.