Sure fire way to make Telerik more money

Here's a suggestion. Take one senior level Sitefinity developer and sit him/her in a room for a day with one junior level writer and task them with developing a How To Guide for developing Custom Modules. Not a "Create a productsDefinition.cs file and cut and paste the following code, but an actual "create a productsDefinition file, here's why, here's how it interacts with the other pieces, you need it for the following scenarios, here's a great real world extension of this basic code," etc. etc.)  I know there are a couple of documents on the productmodule already and a video here or there about what the product module does, but I'm spending so much time jumping from one resource to the next, bugging the SF support team and generally just futzing about trying to figure out how everything is working together in the products module that I wish there was a better way.

I guarantee that if there was one difinitive document that showed how to create a new module ( and please, enough already about the products module, let's see another) and explained how things are working together and outlined a few real world solutions it would probably speed up the development of our websites but 50%. I bet it's the same with many other places. That means that we would have new 4.2 websites out the door much sooner and therefore we'd be buying Telerik licenses at a much quicker rate. I for one know that for every 4.2 site we push out there are 2 or 3 more just waiting to be developed so it just makes sense from a business standpoint to make it easier to develop such an essential piece of the SF architecture.

This is not a hunch I'm going on here. I know there are many other shops like ours that are just getting our feet wet with SF4 now that it is a more stable environment. And I also know that eventually I'll know it like the back of my hand like we did with 3.7 but more documentation would go a huge way to speeding up development. Just seeing one module with instructions like you need a productsdefinition.cs page and here's the code doesn't offer enough guidance.

And I also understand that the SDK is available and there are the links to building a custom module (I'm looking at all of it). I just think more and better documentation and another example of a full blown custom module would go along way to easing my transition and I'm sure many others.

Just a little weekend food for thought.

Thanks.

Hello Kalvin,

We are aware that the current documentation that is available for the products module is not the best learning material we have. In the upcoming months we have clearly set the goal to achieve much better developer guidance by both creating a wide range of conceptual documents on how things work in the product, and step by step code creation with much more comprehensive explanation on why you need things this way.

Do you have any specific suggestions or comments that you want us to consider with a very high priority while building up the topics in the dev guide? We would love to hear your specific suggestions!

Thank you for contacting us.

Best wishes,
Hristo Borisov
the Telerik team

Thanks Hristo,

You hit the nail on the head:

a wide range of conceptual documents on how things work in the product, and step by step code creation with much more comprehensive explanation on why you need things this way.

That will make a huge difference.

Thank you.