That’s a good set of documentation links and the 4 YouTube intro videos are absolutely key, although I’d like to see them backed up by exact equivalent ‘text based’ pages (on YouTube the compression unfortunately makes the @ look like a #, but there’s not a lot you can do about that!)
It would also be nice to stretch the beginner articles to include ‘Pages’ as well, since Pages add the magic ability to deal with pagination which templates don’t, and which is a very important capability if you are going to use Pods seriously.
But I think the area that could be improved most – in terms of documentation – is organisation. So, I’m new to Pods, I go to documentation (http://pods.io/docs/) and in the Learn section I am greeted with a huge amount of info about the different types, but NOT about the usage of those types. i.e. very easy to see how to create Pods but not then to get them on screen. I really think that side of things could do with little more attention. The bottom link ‘Tutorials’ is the one I have to dig into to find how I actually get Pods on screen and then the first item in the list I see (no mention of excellent YouTube videos) is:
“Partial Page Caching and Smart Template Parts with Pods”
which is an advanced subject and not much help to a beginner and in fact off putting to a beginner. I dig through these and I come across
“Pods – Pages and Templates and More Pages OH MY!”
which basically looks like what I need, but it isn’t Pods originated content, is based on an old version of Pods and is, well appears, to be incorrect.
Can you add tags to the articles tutorials and reveal them, so then people could filter by beginner, advanced, creation, display etc. I know there aren’t many articles but it’s just a ‘what the heck’ when you see them all randomly on screen? Maybe just order them so they range from beginner to advanced from top to bottom?
And can you get the YouTube articles linked from an article within tutorials section as I didn’t seem them in there?
That’s some suggestions but just from my personal point of view, hope they make sense and might be of some use. I just feel there needs to be a little more in Pods documentation itself (i.e. written and controlled by you) about how to get pods on screen (as covered by the excellent YouTube walkthroughs, and on using Pages). And the documentation just needs to be better structured and more easily discovered.
My dream is for code on screen (that works and can be copied and pasted!) and instructions that you can walk through to deliver a simple solution to create Pods, then get them on screen, up to and inculding Pages; listed in the Sections | Learn list and then the more advanced stuff is fine covered as is. That way people can quickly get into it, understand the principles and off you go!
Hope that is positive feedback.
