Have you considered creating a separate category for add-ons? If the liferay message boards allow tagging, it would be nice if one could tag his posts by selecting the add-on’s name from a drop down menu. The add-on’s name would then be added to the post’s subject in the form “[AppFoundation]
bla bla bla” or “[LazyQueryContainer]
Lorem ipsum dolor”. Why I think this would be useful, is that us, the add-on developers, would have an easier time to spot forum posts related to the add-ons we’ve created. This probably would increase the chance that the developer himself/herself replies to the post - at least in my case. I do not read every single message posted on these forums and hence there is a risk that questions related to my add-ons might go unanswered if the subject line isn’t well enough formulated to trigger my interest to read the post
My two cents,
Kim
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Edit: Removed the sentence "Those posts are quite rare at the moment, so I don’t think there is a need for a dedicated category for them. " which was related to
this thread , which this post was originally a reply to.
Should we have some subcategories also? Can we force tagging? Or should we just create subcategories for the most popular add-ons?
My first intuition:
Main category: Vaadin Add-ons
[list]
Sub-category: Using add-ons
Sub-category: Development and publishing Add-ons
Sub-category: LazyQueryContainer
Sub-category: AppFoundation
Sub-category: GWT Graphics
Sub-category: …
[/list]
But the challenge is - how to decide when an add-on is popular enough to get its own sub-category… Would it be >= 3 threads in “using add-ons” category?
I wouldn’t go and create subcategories for specific add-ons, I see it as a pain from the maintainability perspective - and as you said, how do one decide when an add-on is popular enough or possibly when is it so outdated that it no longer deserves its own subcategory.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea to force tagging either, because a post might be related to two add-ons (for example, how two add-ons work with each other, eg AppFoundation and LazyQueryContainer). If tagging is forced, then there should at least be such tags as “general”, “multiple” and/or “other”.
Would general add-ons category overlap with UI Components and Data Bindings discussions? I can see the benefit
of having those discussions placed in same category whether add-on or core related. Maybe the add-ons category could be Add-ons Development or something like that?
Volker and I thought forming support forum for Lazy Query Container and preferably in Vaadin portal. Currently our forum link points to one thread in Vaadin Data Bindings category but that thread is getting really bloated. On the other hand just linking to Data Binding category in general might put off users if threads related to LQC is not in the front page. On the other hand LQC gets visibility when our threads are located in Data Bindings category so I guess there is no easy answer. Maybe tagging could give some kind of solution if we can link the forum search with correct tags as query parameters.
As a side-note - we are planning to re-invent forum with a Vaadin-based UI for Liferay (that could be run side-by-side with the current forum - using the same database). If the project succeeds to create a better forum UX, we could maybe support tagging more in the UI…
I think a separate category for Vaadin Add-ons is a great idea, but I wouldn’t create any subcategories at this point. We could follow the activity on this new category for a while and if it still looks like there is a need for separate subcategories, then we could create them.
Add-ons category is now added. I tried to move all of the existing add-on related threads to the category, but might have missed some. If you find a thread that should be in the Add-ons category, please drop a message and I’ll move it to the correct place.
