TW needs to be more beginner friendly. This is how.

[twMat]

Possibly because I work as a teacher, I constantly stumble over things in TW where I think "Oh, a newcomer would not understand this!". As experienced users we take a lot of things for granted in TW but for a newcomer there are loads of things in TW that are very quirky and totally not obvious. Here are two arbitrary examples:

• Under Ctrlpanel > Appearance > Story view you can switch between "classic" and "pop". But it is not self evident what a "story view" is and there is no direct feedback when clicking "classic" and "pop" (...but zoomin seems to close all tiddlers except for one!?) We should probably add some tooltip for switcher list alternatives...
• A standard has evolved in much software, notably browsers, to feature an "About" section in their settings. Among other things, this is often where you go to manually update the software. TW doesn't feature this and a newcomer does not really get any info on how to upgrade his TW. This lack is a pretty big deal and the implication is that we expect people to go to tw.com and search for how to upgrade, etc. (Just imagine if this was expected of you to use a browser or the OS! )

I can give loads of more examples where helpful pointers and UI tweaks are needed. BUT, of course, as experienced users we don't want "explanations" and fluff in our wikis. We want slim! Still though, everyone is a noob to begin with so serving this "group" is very important for TW. The critque of TWs "steep learning curve" is persistent.

For these reasons, I propose an official "support" plugin. As indicated, the information therein is not pure "documentation" nor is it suitable for the "Tour" plugin (that'd be one boring tour!), rather it'd be guidance that is very integrated with the TW UI. But here is the critical part:

The plugin would have to be ...

• included in the standard distro (presumably with a possibility to delete the plugin),
  ~ or ~
• offered as part of an optional "beginners distro"
  ~ or (the least helpful option if it is to help beginners) ~
• offered as an official but not preinstalled plugin

It is critical that it is presented officially so I am addressing @Jermolene . We cannot expect the very people who would benefit from this to install an unofficial plugin for this because this requires that the poor newbie must...

1. find out that they ought to install the plugin
   ...but how do they find this out?
   ...and if this is officially stated, then a fair question is "so why didn't it just come preinstalled?"
2. search/navigate to the plugin
3. trust the plugin
4. learn how to install a plugin
5. actually do the install

...and still feel that "Yes! So much better than Notion [...]"

This lack of built-in guidance for newbies is a prime example of the "steep learning curve" and I'm guessing we've lost many potential community members because of this. The proposal is a concrete step to mitigate this.

I envision that such a plugin would be developed as a separate project. As evidenced from the talk group, there are many competent people who enthusiastically participate in these things and love to help newbies.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

[CrossEye]

Agreed on all points. On a very related note, I think we really need to reconsider having the documentation in the tiddlywiki.com main page. It would be extremely painful to move, but I think that if we could build documentation that takes seriously the Divio documentation structure, we would better serve all users, but especially beginners.

[twMat]

Great ideas! I think they should be raiseed in a separate discussion. I have some questions about it. :-)

[linonetwo]

Do you mean adding more Tooltips?

I have thought of #8154 , we can have several document plugins, and a tooltip plugin to show some of them. Core document plugins are showing usage for widget and macros, and a document plugin to show tutorial or UI usage infos.

Still, I'm waiting for i18n framwork to create more tours.

[twMat]

Well, I give two examples in the OP of which one is (potentially) about tooltips. Not all help is best expressed as brief tooltip "hints" or even as text. Some help is best given by e.g pointing at stuff, or linking to stuff, or perhaps iframes with videos or perhaps even discussion threads...

But your #8154 idea to turn the official documentation into in-wiki help is a brilliant idea!

[CodaCodr]

That Divio thing (though they don't seem keen to acknowledge it) is actually Diátaxis.

#justsayin

[CrossEye]

Well, it's a system described by Daniele Procida when he was at Divio.

Diátaxis is a later rename and expansion of those ideas. But I will try to remember that name, because, if nothing else, it's a lot easier to search the web for it!