Blah blah community

In college, my buddy said "blaise blaise" and "yadda yadda" instead of "blah blah." I'm sorry that I use, "blog blog." Your word choice and lingo depends on your community.

Here's a Yet Another Reason to join the Tridion Technical community: to understand each other.

When I say "join" I mean one or more of:

1. Read
2. Ask or Answer
3. Post
4. Contribute Code

What, no blogging? Blogging is for your expression, career development, and SEO optimization. Blogging is "wow, I remember when it took 1337 skills and money to make a website." Blogging isn't for everyone and no one does it the same, but don't blog for the community. Blog for you.

But follow The Tridion Technical Community to learn memes, culture, and especially lingo.

If you like "blah blah-ing" like me, you can even create some of these mental shortcuts that you won't find in any documentation. Recognize these?

• Midas Rule of Open Source Projects (careful what you volunteer for)
• Link Propagation (Doesn't sound familiar? Post more. Or maybe use Tridion more.)
• Minimize Localizations (No? Read more.)
• "First figure out how you'd do it without Tridion." (If you don't know who says this, come back to earth, your Tridionaut status is revoked.)

After finishing a 9-week customer engagement for functional work, a colleague asked "but how did you know the best practice?" I suggested six years in IT with three spent creating and breaking stuff with Tridion is a good start for a functional. However, TridionWorld made the biggest difference--it's seeped in The Tridion Technical Community culture.

Btw, experience doesn't mean expertise, especially mine. Practice makes permanent and getting older means gaining age, not necessarily wisdom. Three years Tridion experience is two years wasted if it's the same year, three times.


Things TridionWorld and the community taught me:

• Who's the most helpful?
• Who likes to go "blah blah?" (me!)
• Best Practices! (learn how many ways you can do something wrong)
• How to ask Smart Tridion questions (oops, there's the "s" word, might as well just throw in automobile, car, and frame to confuse the bots)
• Terms! omg wtf bbq (sorry, wrong community). But terminology confusion confounds community understanding (where's Yoav, maybe he can turn that into a haiku).
• Who's the best.*

Finally back to my thesis. Is this familiar?

Questioner1: "I want to do X."
Answerer1:  "Try A."
Questioner1 "Can I do Y instead?"
Answerer1: "Try B."
Questioner1: "Ok, I'll do Z."

Ok, sure sometimes Z is better in certain scenarios (When "123" is missing, of course). But damn it gets really hard when my "X" doesn't mean your "X."

So, be especially careful with:

• Folder, which could be on a local machine, mean the actual Tridion (item) folder, be mistaken for a structure group, exist on a presentation server, or hold some configuration on the content manager server itself.
• Is Workflow the Tridion feature or your update process?
• If you're customizing Tridion, you're doing it wrong, or simply using the wrong word. Try implementation or extension.
• Page could be anything.

"I want a customized page for my user's workflow so that after user selects a file from their folders (for the page), the page updates, and auto-publishes the customized page (that page, not this page) so the end user can see the page... on the site."

You can ask that once, the community will help discover what it really means. Then we all gain in the long run. But first you have to read, ask or answer, post, or contribute code.

Welcome to the community.