Best location for Guides, 101, Best Practices

Hi everyone,

I’ve been using Tiller for a few years now but still basically using the Foundations template and not having the time to keep up with all the new developments, best practices and extended use cases that are possible now with Tiller. I’ve been trying to find a better structured way to read up on the best practices and get caught up with what’s possible but haven’t been successful. The Tiller Foundation quick start guide on the main site is pretty light, the community content is too broad and the blog content is not the best format to get caught up.

Are there better ways for a newbie to learn the basics but have a guided way of learning about advanced topics? Feels like all the content is somewhere and just needs to be pieced together in a browsable format.

Thanks

Mark

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@mark.chien,

This is a great question and helpful feedback on the way the Tiller Money team shares & communicates.

If you don’t already subscribe, the Tiller Money Memo is a great place to start. Each week, @Heather, @Edward and @Peter highlight a few exciting developments across the breadth of the Tiller Landscape: banking updates, Tiller Money Feeds add-on improvements, interesting threads in this community, and new features & templates in the Tiller Money Labs add-on.

Another way to catch up is to search the Community on the labs-roundup tag. These posts are whats-new updates for the Tiller Money Labs add-on. I usually post one every few weeks.

Both the Memo and the Roundup are easiest to digest a little each week as updates are posted. I see your point that if you now have bandwidth/capacity, there isn’t a quick summary for catching up on everything…

We don’t want to keep creating new communication channels, but, at the same time, we to make sure the ones we have are well-suited to everyone’s needs.

Do you have any suggestions for how we can do better?

Randy

@mark.chien,

Generally, new developments are announced here on the Community under News & Announcements, including the Labs roundup that Randy mentioned, but also official product news/releases/fixes.

Anything from the Tiller Money Labs add-on is documented under Wikis & Webinars > Tiller Labs, which are all just experimental features to show what’s possible with the data feeds (mostly in Google Sheets).

Community members post their solutions to show what’s possible in Show & Tell

The help center content changes less frequently, and is focused only on what you get “out of the box” with the Foundation Template and Tiller Money Feeds, and corresponds to official product releases, which are posted under News & Announcements.

How about having one web location where we can get information on best practices and setups all in one place? Like a wiki. Put how to use and best ways to use it in one place that someone from Tiller curates with an easy way to search and/or hierarchical menu items. The latter I like as search terms may not always be known and a menu structure helps users identify unfamiliar terms.

2 Likes

My suggestion would be to change the initial login page to a dashboard like interface which would include links to each of these valuable resources. Also, the login session between this dashboard should be shared out to the forum so one doesn’t have to login twice, or more, as they navigate about.

These are all great suggestions. However, I think one common challenge with launched software and services is remembering what the new user experience looks like. In many ways, my experience would be very much like a new user. I check the site out, download the foundations template and use the limited help information to get started. However, once this material is done, the experience becomes a firehose. The community is bustling with many threads, the blogs, memos and newsletters are all sorted by chronological vs. a guided way for a new user to learn more advanced techniques.

Often times, companies listen to their existing customers where they are naturally brought along when there are new features and announcements so it gives a false sense of security that all users are up to speed on the latest best practices.

A good practice is to have excellent and organized reference material that can walk a user through what areas they are interested in doing. Even just listing some good posts to review would be helpful. @gws.tahiti mentioned using a wiki which is a great mechanism since it’s organized and it allows the community to contribute and help keep it up to date and relevant.

Mark

3 Likes

Thanks @mark.chien and others who have chimed in.

Super Heros in the community can create wikis :wink:

Onboarding new Tiller Money customers is an ever evolving experience :slight_smile: