I have installed all the available tutorials (and simple Fuel projects from git)...
After a few months (fitting tutorials in between other work), I realised I did learn some Fuel basics but I never really got to the stage where I could turn this knowledge into a practical project...
The main difficulty with current tutorials, including GIT projects is the lack of a structured feedback mechanism...
Pretty much all those I installed were written by one individual and tended to be written using different versions of the Fuel framework.... what worked during development of the tutorial wouldn't work with the current version...
Proposed Tutorial:
As the most common tutorials in relation to frameworks appears to be the Blog tutorial I guess this is a good place to start...
Method of interaction
Rather than another site or GIT repository, I propose the tutorial takes the form of an Official Tutorial Forum...
The first post in each thread would contain the actual tutorial section... each subsequent posts would allow members to interact and ask questions...
The major advantage of using a forum based tutorial is... it has built in community support...
Members who have a better grasp of the Fuel framework might not have time to support non site based tutorials but would probably have the time to read a few posts and make suggestion in relation to problems faced by people trying to learn Fuel...
It's just a suggestion...
Off site tutorials suffer from one big failing, they are written based on the framework at a specific point in time... By the time most people find and install them, there is a very good chance they will not work as was intended... It's difficult enough struggling with the learning curve, you should not have to debug the code...
I have looked into all of the main framework and proceeded to install associated tutorials... to my surprise, it was difficult to find a tutorial that actually worked...
We will no doubt learn the basic framework concepts in time, but most will agree it's by doing we gain most knowledge, so it's essential to start with a working tutorial that doesn't get broken with every update... If it does, then provide a mechanism to find the required updates and fix the tutorial, in itself possibly a good learning tool...
The tutorial that I am currently writing I plan on keeping it up to date best I can. But there is a huge gap for beginners understanding the required environments and getting the ball rolling.
I realise there are often issues for beginners in relation to setting up the basic environment, but as the tutorial is open, everyone can assist with these...
In an ideal world the tutorial forum would be divided into three categories:1) Set up and Installation: (read/write by everyone)
Setting up your environment and getting started... (beginners start here)...
2) The tutorial: (read/write by authors or experts)
The actual tutorial by the author/authors....
This would include posts detailing any updates necessitated by framework updates...
Only valid posts should be permitted, all unnecessary posts should be *deleted to prevent the usual clutter...
3) General discussion:
To prevent the actual tutorial from being inundated with posts all discussion takes place here...
*Note...
If the Tutorial Category could not be made writeable by authors only, I would strongly discourage any posting that did not add value, else I would strongly indicate that unnecessary posts will be removed...
I've set up a sample forum including permissions at my site to work out the particulars... created a group called blog authors and another called fuel experts so I can assign access... All members gets full access to the setup/install and general discussion forums but only read access to the actual Blog Tutorial...
If the community wants to have the tutorial in different languages, it would be a pleasure for me to translate it to spanish. It would be a good idea to do something similar to Jobeet, the 23 chapters tutorial book for Symfony.
Advanced chapters should talk about the H in HMVC (how to use it the right way, when and why), Packages and Application Modules, among others. I believe the advanced part should teach not only how to get the maximum from the framework but how to use it the right way by promoting best practices. Only experts can teach how to do this the right way.
Definitely, this could be a huge boost for the conquest of the php frameworks universe
I agree. It's my first time to use frameworks and it's a pain in the ass understanding how it works based on FuelPHP's documentation. There must be atleast a little tutorial on an example of how you can make use of FuelPHP on a little project.
Hi Mike, that would be great. I've been studying Fuel for the last weeks, it's not easy to grab the whole thing. Tutorial at Nettuts from Phil Sturgeon is great but not enough to grasp the whole thing. Just awaiting for the second part. Another good tutorial is at http://blog.justni.com/quick-web-application-development-with-fuelphp-tutorial/ but again, it lacks a general vision of the whole framework possibilites.
I think this framework is great and it's worth to learn it. Hope your forum based tutorial idea gets enough support. -
The problem with adding it as part of the Docs are that there's limitless possibilities and there's always more than one way to do something.
However, I'd agree the problems are often that a tutorial can swiftly go out of date.
It's very easy to forget what it's like to be a beginner. When adding notes to the Docs I've been told FuelPHP shouldn't be teaching people about namespaces, but FuelPHP is my first experience of namespaces and it's only been in PHP since version 5.3. So I doubt that adding a 1-2-3 tutorial would be accepted by the team.
However, I do think that some sort of community-based tutorial that can be updated as the code changes would be viable. Having a repository on the FuelPHP GitHub organisation would be great https://github.com/fuel and then let us write it as if you'd never used a framework before. Or we just get on and do it ourselves.
Mike: I think a better way of managing it would be by using Git, accepting changes and keeping comments as Issues, we already have a forum and it can get messy quickly, plus the data isn't very portable. I'd argue using something like Markdown would be best for writing the tutorial.
@Thomas: Git would be a perfect tool for the development of the projects code, however, as a teaching tool, it lacks the fundamental communication process required in any learning process... assume you meant keeping everything at the git repository which I doubt after rereading...
I totally agree, posts/threads can become cluttered and this would indeed be a problem... constant pruning and moderation would be key...
I also suggested the actual tutorial thread would not be writeable by members, only those involved in writing the actual code... All other discussion would be handled in another thread... this would go some way to keeping clutter at a minimum...
I'm not saying the forum approach would be a perfect solution but it does provide some level of intercommunication a classroom environment might afford...
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