Input needed: how do you get started with Commons?

Submitted by lisarex(37)

16 September, 2011 - 12:40

Groups:

Commons documentation

Terms:

Help us improve Acquia Commons by answering the question, “How do you get started?”

Vote up the tasks you do when setting up your Commons site for the first time, and add any that are missing. This information will help us prioritize and shape enhancements to Commons over the coming months.

Give your feedback on Acquia Commons now!

The first round of feedback will be collected in a week or so, but feel free to add more ideas anytime. If you have any questions about this feedback process, please contact lisa.rex@acquia.com.

Best,
The Acquia User Experience team

Comments

dmoorevtedu34 weeks 4 days ago

Poke around here

The first thing I did (before installing) was to poke around on this site. If I found this site now, I doubt I would have explored Commons further. There are few groups and little activity. Registered users can't create new groups. Now we use the issue queue for bugs and uservoice for feedback? If the early adopters don't use commons for what it was intended for, I doubt others will appreciate the value enough to actually install it. I think we neeed to go back to eating our own dogfood. Just my 2 cents. Nuff said.

Mark C34 weeks 3 min ago

I agree

This site is a mess, too many groups that seem to have duplicate activity. I'm never sure where I should post the questions I want.

On top of that, there isn't any feel of this being a social network or community, it looks ugly, feels clunky, and lacks coherency.

The question: what do *you* do to get started with Commons is probably badly phrased. I would guess that not many people have "started" with Commons more than once. I am using it for a very big project, but I can't imagine needing to use it for a while after that. Given that it's only a year old, I wouldn't think many people have used it for more than one site (besides playing around with it).

Some decent documentation would be nice.

For me, to "get started" on the site I am presently developing, I spent ages seeing how things were organised and categorised; then we realised there were too many functions for what we need it, so we removed discussions, wikis, documents, and more. Now we wish to reomove user tags, but it seems they are needed by core, so we can't (or haven't come up with a workaround).

I'm also surprised that some modules are not used, such as Admin Menu. There is more, but I don't want to continue on the negative trend since it is a very good product - just needs some tweaking and lots of documentation (unless you are holding off on that so that people will have to use Acquia's services!)