Freely available Pimcore user documentation
Most developers are familiar with the situation: the website is complete, the training is a success - but the introduction of the new system is still a big challenge for many customers. With the stressful day-to-day business behind you, learning a new tool, no matter how intuitive and easy to use, is not exactly at the top of your list of priorities.
For this reason, we have adopted a Pimcore documentation, put a lot of time and energy - and publish it now for free and accessible to anyone on the net. But anyone who has ever produced a software manual knows: it's a complex and time-consuming job. Why do we do that?
Great need from our customers
Often our customers asked for Pimcore guidance to help them maintain their Pimcore solution. Even after a long search, we did not find anything - so there is no complete Pimcore documentation that supports the user. Pimcore itself is constantly developing its great online digital platform, providing developer-focused documentation.
Since we consider user documentation to be equally important and the need for it exists, we took this into our own hands.
From foundations to documents to assets and objects
So we got down to work and first created the complete content with screenshots and instructional texts. We divided this into 4 areas we know from Pimcore itself: Documents, Assets, Objects and Pimcore Basics. The documentation should, in addition to good content, also appeal visually. A complete PDF documentation (available in German) that we can email and publish on our website was our first product - version 1.0, so to speak.
Get the documentation now (PDF)
A user-friendly search
In today's busy times, many Pimcore users would not bother to read a 50-page document to find the solution to their problem. And not everyone is familiar with the search function for PDF files. So we created a second version, which is located directly on our new website and should be a lot more user-friendly. Version 2.0 is now a simple search box on our website - as we know it from Google. The Pimcore user enters his problem and the website provides the appropriate instructions. Since our complete website is bilingual (German and English), the online tutorials are also available in English.
Video tutorials and screencasts
Video tutorials or screencasts are widely used. Someone explains a topic and shows it on his recorded screen step by step. In order to be able to offer our individual Pimcore instructions even more comprehensible, we also create a screencast for every written instruction, which we publish on our website as well as on YouTube. So far 53 videos from the section "Pimcore Basics" can be found on YouTube - more will follow.
And all for free?
As mentioned in the introduction, creating a software manual is a time-consuming task. Why do not we want to profit from this? Well, there's a world of giving and taking - Pimcore offers an excellent online platform for free so we want to return some guidance explaining its handling. Similarly, many Pimcore partners also offer open source plug-ins, some of which we use for our own web projects. We think each partner is happy to receive documentation that he can recommend to his clients.
Pimcore is becoming more and more popular. Especially in the US, the online platform is on the rise. We want to help Pimcore spread even more. If somebody has a hard time deciding on a software, our documentation can provide insight into Pimcore. Potential Pimcore users will be thrilled if they see the ease of use in our tutorials. Also, an existing documentation can be an additional criterion for the decision for Pimcore - especially with technical laymen.
And finally a thank you
So, dear Pimcore community, thank you very much for reading our blog article. We'd appreciate feedback on our Pimcore documentation - and if you like what we've created, spread it on social media and let your customers know about it.
