We've recently released a quick start guide for concrete5.7, a handy, printable guide to help newcomers. This time we've done things a little differently, by releasing it on Leanpub and Github.

It's fair to say that we've introduced concrete5 to many clients, of all sorts of backgrounds and computing experience levels. We've overwhelming found that our clients pick up editing concepts in concrete5 quickly, with it generally only taking a few minutes to talk them through the basics - it's ease of use is one of the main reasons we recommend and use concrete5.

Although some of our clients are quite 'tech savvy' and jump straight in, we always like to provide new editors with what we call a 'quick start' guide - it's a concise and printable guide covering the essentials of editing a concrete5 website.

Our experience has been that our clients really like receiving this guide - it gives them the confidence to start editing straight away and at their own pace. If they don't edit their site on a regular basis it also acts as a great quick reference guide.

For 5.7, we decided to re-work our guide, trying out a different approach to creating it, by using Leanpub. Leanpub automatically generates books (in pdf, epub and mobi), from markdown text files and provides a neat platform for offering books for download and sale.

We've recently published our latest quick start guide, and it's now available for download here: https://leanpub.com/concrete5quickstartguide/

The guide is around 16 pages of content and designed to be either emailed as an attachment or quickly printed.

You're welcome to download it for free, or if you'd like to say thanks you can purchase it for a price of your choosing - it's up to you.

screenshot_book.png

A quick sample of content from the guide

Although the guide could be considered documentation of a sort, it only attempts to cover the essential editing tasks and not be comprehensive - the official online guide to concrete5 serves the purpose of being complete documentation. The goal with this guide is for it to be as short and to the point as possible - more of a 'cheat sheet' than a manual.

cc licence.png

The book has been released under a Creative Commons licence, so you're welcome to re-work it for your own purposes. Above the CC license we've added a note to indicate that it's appropriate to remove the attribution (i.e. my name) from the guide for the purposes of presenting a more generic version to your clients privately. In other words, simply use it as a resource to help train your clients in a way that suits you.

Fixes and suggestions welcome

Leanpub is a really interesting service, it allows you to write your book via several different ways, including placing your book files on Dropbox or Github. We elected to push the book's files to a github repository, which you can visit here: https://github.com/Mesuva/concrete5-quick-start-guide

As it's on Github and under a CC license, if you'd like to help fine-tune the book, whether it be to fix mistakes, re-word parts or improve screenshots, such improvements would certainly be welcome. Like other open source projects, simply fork the project, create a branch for your customisation and make a pull request. 

Please just keep the goals of the quick start guide in mind - the guide is supposed to be very concise, only covering essential editing tasks.

We'll continue to enhance and refine this guide going into the future, keeping it updated with any interface changes in concrete5.

-Ryan