I am trying to get familiar with TotalCMS, but that doesn’t seem really easy. Just clicking here and there and hoping to find out what to do seems to be the wrong way. Indeed, there are some video tutorials but for a non English user it is hard to follow the video and to understand the explanations by Joe.
So my question is: Is there any written step by step tutorial that helps to learn TotalCMS? (I know the JW doc portal but that doesn’t help so much)
We are working on written tutorials, in fact I am almost done with the first new one. Something we will definitely be adding to. Of course, they will be in English though.
That’s good to hear. I have no problems to read an English tutorial but it is really hard to do this with a video in English. I think it’s the same to many of non English users.
Yes, you are competly right. I was using the trial version of TotalCMS too, but did not get along with the videos.
It is much easier with Foundation, but even there i would appreciate a written manual too.
The problem is not english, but reading is much easier than listening to a video.
The problem with the video tutorials is: Joe speaks slowly, so I can understand most of the things he explains. But a lot of of the non English users will have less knowledge in English language, they often can read a text but hearing a text is a different thing. For those it would be a great thing to have written manuals.
My problem is: When I see a video (that’s not only with Joe’s videos), I see sth and a few moments later I have forgotten what I have heard, I have to go back and forth etc. The 1st video took me more than a whole day to learn and try out all these different things and I think I am still at the very beginning. Maybe younger people have less problems to learn from videos but I’m over 60 years old and never had been a friend of video tutorials - irrespective wether in English or in my home language.
Foundation is complex but after a long time you can find everything out by trail and error and without any video manual. But TotalCMS (especially TotalBlog) seems a lot more complex and the trail and error method will not help. And for me a video tutorial is less more than an assisted trail and error method
Just my two cents.
Maybe you are right and it is also a question of age. I am a little bit younger than you are, but in the end i definitly prefer written tutorials.
Video tutorials are not my kind of thing, doesn’t matter for which product at all…
Videos, yes, but in the pedagogical department, there is nobody (even Joe) that surpasses Ryan Smith of Rapidweaver Classroom. His lessons are comprehensive and totally lucid, and in those areas that he addresses, he pretty much covers all bases. Although not recent, he has a really good introduction to Foundation on his website.
Unhappily, tragic events in his personal life have prevented him from currently keeping up the pace of previous years. The offerings are way fewer and further between. Nevertheless, I would dearly love if he would do a series on Andrew’s Big White Duck stacks, which are incredibly powerful but more than a little inscrutable.
@Butternut – Not to contradict your statement about BWD stacks, but you can get a lot of useful info about features and functionality of his stacks if you hover your cursor over the settings of any stack he made. I know same applies to Will Woodgate’s and others’ stacks…
I do know that. Thanks.
But you first need to understand what a lot of the terms mean, and what they actually affect, before that information becomes useful and usable. In fact, you need also understand what the stack does, which (forgive my non-power user status) is not always clear to me either.
That’s why I have always found Ryan’s tutorials so valuable. He starts at A, goes to B, then proceeds to C. He’s very linear, and very lucid.