I am working on a guided tour for users at my most recently converted board. I'm still trying to think of things to add to it, and picking up on suggestions from users on what to add to it. This board was last converted about 8 years ago, and came from vBulletin, so it was a vast sweeping change that I felt I needed to have a guide tailored to them. Many people don't have a knack for figuring out new forums, and I needed to figure out a bunch of this stuff myself anyway, to expand my perspective. So, it describes many things from scratch, tries to explain things in simple terms, and shows buttons and examples that are as close to live as I can get them.
It's self-aware - e.g. if they're not logged in, it starts off by pointing them in that direction (or to the sign up page if registration is enabled). If they don't have an avatar, it tells them how/why to get one. And so on and so forth. It uses a lot of XenForo template syntax in order to do this, as well as to grab the CSS needed to show the users the buttons exactly as they would look in the selected style. I decided to do that instead of a bunch of screenshots, because while screenshots do the job, they don't do the job as well as I wanted (especially for how many different styles and browsers my users are using).
My intent is to be able to share this with the community, especially once it's more fleshed out, but at the moment I'm not quite sure how to distribute it. It's currently a collection of page nodes on my forum, with specific URL portions needed in order to maintain all the links. There is also some CSS needed to support it. That basically involves a lot of copying & pasting in order to set it up, which is not nearly as elegant as I'd like, but I'd still be happy to distribute it that way if anyone is brave enough and if it would help.
You can take a look at the work in progress at http://racing-forums.com/pages/help/
I'd like any and all input. Especially on what topics to cover, how to make the HTML or the presentation cleaner, how to improve the language to describe things better, etc. As I am fond of telling my peeps, I don't have all the answers because I can't think of every question.
It's self-aware - e.g. if they're not logged in, it starts off by pointing them in that direction (or to the sign up page if registration is enabled). If they don't have an avatar, it tells them how/why to get one. And so on and so forth. It uses a lot of XenForo template syntax in order to do this, as well as to grab the CSS needed to show the users the buttons exactly as they would look in the selected style. I decided to do that instead of a bunch of screenshots, because while screenshots do the job, they don't do the job as well as I wanted (especially for how many different styles and browsers my users are using).
My intent is to be able to share this with the community, especially once it's more fleshed out, but at the moment I'm not quite sure how to distribute it. It's currently a collection of page nodes on my forum, with specific URL portions needed in order to maintain all the links. There is also some CSS needed to support it. That basically involves a lot of copying & pasting in order to set it up, which is not nearly as elegant as I'd like, but I'd still be happy to distribute it that way if anyone is brave enough and if it would help.
You can take a look at the work in progress at http://racing-forums.com/pages/help/
I'd like any and all input. Especially on what topics to cover, how to make the HTML or the presentation cleaner, how to improve the language to describe things better, etc. As I am fond of telling my peeps, I don't have all the answers because I can't think of every question.
