What will I learn to do?
As a webmaster you are bound to from time to time face difficulties that you can not solve on your own.
However, it is very likely that other webmasters have already faced the same difficulties as you, and they may be able to provide assistance.
How can you get help from this large community?
In this lesson you will learn:
Forums versus Mailing lists
The mailing lists are not the only possible sources of help, you can also use the Spip’s forums.
The forums exist in several languanges (Arabic, French, Spanish, German, English...).
The forums are technically easier to use than the mailing lists, since you do not have to subscribe to start using them.
Nevertheless the mailing lists are much more reactive than forum, and once you subscribe to a mailing list you are more likely to help when the time comes.
How the SPIP community is organised and how to reach it thanks to the mailing lists
What best practices to follow before and when asking for help
How is the SPIP community organised and how can I reach it?
The original SPIP developers were not really developers in the sense that we understand now: they were webmasters who worked with journalists. These journalists had decided that they would use the web as publishing space.
Very quickly, the need for a product that did not require specific technical skills to be able to publish content became apparent. It is through this creation and then quick evolution of the SPIP publication system that they became fully-fledged developers.
If you face a difficulty you cannot solve with the documentation or reading the SPIP related sites, the best way is to ask the community, using one of the two mailing lists.
You will hardly ever be in contact with the original developers team, but the community includes highly skilled SPIP webmasters, that will be most of the time very happy to help you.
The users mailing list can be found here:
http://listes.rezo.net/mailman/listinfo/spip
The name is slightly misleading; it suggests that it is a list of users in the sense of SPIP editors or admistrators when in fact it is a list of webmasters implementing sites using SPIP.
It can prove very useful to subscribe to the SPIP users list as this is how you will find the quickest and most appropriate solutions to the difficulties you encounter as a novice webmaster.
You will be able to get support from it and in turn provide support to others.
The developers mailing list can be found here:
http://listes.rezo.net/mailman/listinfo/spip-dev
This is a list of the SPIP developers. You could yourself be on this list if you were testing a development version of SPIP and needed to raise bugs, or if you were working on core SPIP development or possibly if you were developing new plug-ins.
