Learning and Chastising

Gosh sometimes I both love and hate other techies. I got the following comment on my blog this morning

There are two problems with this howto:

1) there is a setting to disable these on admin/build/views/tools — clearly you should browse these settings as there are some useful things there.

2) Even not finding that, all tpl.php filesare templates that you can copy to your theme which will override the default. I would be very wary of taking advice from anybody who does not know this as it is a key Drupal feature and I don’t know how you can use drupal effectively without knowing this. Besides that, it’s also clearly documented in Views’ advanced help.

My reaction was twofold. One, cool, there is an easier way to do this. Glad to learn something new. Two, gosh this type of chastisement is why many people don’t like open source or the open source community. Working with OSS is a real learning experience and sometimes you make lots of mistakes in order to figure out the correct and most efficient way to do things. I learn by doing with real world stuff. When I post about my experiences with Drupal on my blog it is mostly be trying to share problems I’ve encountered and how I solved them, that doesn’t mean my way is the only or correct way, just that it worked for me. I love hearing if there is a better or different way. Particularly when I’ve spent several hours reading documentation and searching the net for how to do something. But I think this comment makes some assumptions that OSS techies often make which are false:

1. All people running OSS should endeavor to be experts about the software that they are using
2. The documentation for how to do things: exists, is well written, and easily findable.

Often this is FAR, FAR from the case. The Views module has good documentation, better than many other Drupal modules, but the most useful documentation for Views isn’t fabulously findable. Partly because there are too many links using the word “documentation” on the Views module webpage and partly because it is intended to be installed (with the help of an other module) in situ in Drupal.

The bottom line is that working with Drupal is a learning experience, the best way to bring people along is to provide them with an environment where they can make mistakes and have supportive set of coaches. This is something I believe that OSS world still has much to learn about.