I can see the richness of the resources on Meta but usually advice is aimed at people with some basic coding knowledge. Our community (a network of people keen to build a more sustainable food system in our city) is made up of entirely non-coders and, so far, forum hasn’t been used- but members have suggested some potential uses eg as a place to build a food strategy, and I want to show them all the features, but even changing basic configurations is a challenge for a beginner like me- I wanted to follow the instructions on how to make wikis look more obvious but when I C+P’d the CSS text in this thread and tried to save, it gave me error message: I don’t know where new lines, brackets, semi-colons etc should go and what they mean- is there a place on here where total beginners can learn things from first principles?! Maybe there are places outside of Discourse I need to be looking? I feel we’re hardly touching the potential of the forum…Humble thanks! Change the style of a wiki post

For the basics of CSS, perhaps start here: [image] W3Schools.com W3Schools offers free online tutorials, references and exercises in all the major languages of the web. Covering popular subjects like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, SQL, Java, and many, many more. That site is a pretty good reference even after you learn the basics, imo.

Yeah, meta is not a site focussed on teaching web development, so it is right to use other more appropriate resources on the internet. There are excellent guides on here, though, start with: Beginner's guide to using Discourse Themes and Developing Discourse Themes & Theme Components If you don’t understand anything that looks ‘general CSS or HTML’ then stop and search for a guide on that aspect somewhere on the web.

Well, the problem is not learning CSS or learning how to program in ruby, but the structure of discourse itself, how its interface is organize, how the tree of display elements work (in order to find the correct name of elements to change css styles), etc. For learning css and ruby programming there are plenty of sites, although links to good learning sites are always welcome. Thanks for the links to the guides, I am interested in making basic css adjustments and some basic components and plugins. Are there similar guides to theme components and plugins?

[image] Developing Discourse Plugins - Part 1 - Create a basic plugin Developer Guides Building a plugin in Discourse can be really simple, once you learn a couple of quirks. The goal of this post is to create a skeleton plugin and introduce you to the basics. Your development environment Make sure you have a development environment of Discourse running on your computer. I recommend you use the appropriate setup guide and come back when you’re done. plugin.rb tada Use GitHub - discourse/discourse-plugin-skeleton: Template for Discourse plugins · GitHub to create a complete di…

[image] ariznaf: Well, the problem is not learning CSS of learning how to program in ruby, but the structure of discourse itshelf, how its interface is organize, how the tree of display elements work (in order to find the correct name of elements to change css styles), etc You know how to use the inspector in Firefox or Chrome, right? [inspector]

Yes and it is of great utility, but does not provide a clear view of how the interface is organized, you need to navigate deep in the html to get it. I will read the tutorials posted to get a global idea of how discourse works and is designed.

Honestly, Discourse is a pretty complex app – more complex than a few written tutorials can teach. I highly recommend getting a solid base of understanding on Rails and Ember.js, then digging through the codebase, tracing codepaths as best as you can (though I will say this is not easy at first). Also be sure to look at plugins to see how they tie into Discourse (as there are good ways and bad ways to do this). @angus wrote up a fantastic beginners guide on the basic knowledge you’ll need to get started. [image] Learn how to start building stuff for Discourse if you're newbie (like myself) Developers There are a few ‘how to start’ guides for working with Discourse already and a wealth of useful info on meta, but I thought it might help to give an insight to the mental processes of starting from little, if any, prior coding experience to building substantial Discourse plugins. Discourse is written by experienced developers and has a large codebase. This can feel intimidating. This intimidation factor can be a significant barrier for novice developers. This is a kind of ‘psychological primer’… Of course, a lot of this is going to seem like a foreign language until you start to build and experiment further. I’ve been developing on Discourse for 1.5 years now and am only now feeling like I have any sort of understanding how the app works.

This is interesting. Would you tend to suggest that Discourse is best for communities whose members include some coding knowledge, or would you say that at its most basic, it can work well for groups whose members have none (but didn’t want to use Facebook)? The wiki function, for example, is something our members would like to use to shape documents like a charter, but the default settings make it quite hard to tell that it’s a wiki, hence wanting to customise it according to the suggestions in Change the style of a wiki post and finding that the instructions for many customisations assume a basic level of coding capacity and knowledge of terms.

[image] charlie_spring: Would you tend to suggest that Discourse is best for communities whose members include some coding knowledge, or would you say that at its most basic, it can work well for groups whose members have none (but didn’t want to use Facebook)? Definitely does not require coding knowledge to use! Facebook is not the only UI people can and should get used to. That said, with flexibility comes some increased complexity. It’s just a question of how much you want to customise things. If you want to go beyond what the rich settings provide you, you need to learn some basics.

I don’t think the OP was asking about writing plugins?

Place for total coding beginners to learn how to customise?

Development

cjk77 (Chris Klugewicz) October 9, 2019, 9:21am 2

For the basics of CSS, perhaps start here:

That site is a pretty good reference even after you learn the basics, imo.

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Place for total coding beginners to learn how to customise?

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