Pinegrow needs a private Facebook Group

I just purchased Pinegrow (WP Version) and I am very excited about what I might be able to do with it. I am a little surprised at the lack of community for it, though. Would anyone be interested in joining a private Facebook group for Pinegrow? I know there is a public FB group but I do not want my public posts appearing on my private timeline. I also have Oxygen and that group is thriving on FB with loads of interaction. I believe more people would be interested in Pinegrow if the community was more active.

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There is one fb group I created but there is not much interaction . The spirit of current PG average users is different from other app user. They are more “nerdy” less “social animals” i imagine them more like lone wolf at coding. There is also the slack channel. We both agree it is a great tool.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/162727434398763/

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The problem with public groups on FB is that your posts in that group appear on your FB personal timeline. I think there are more people like me (I know enough to know that Pinegrow is really interesting but I still have alot to learn) that just do not know about Pinegrow. I, myself, had to come back around to it before I understood what it is and what it is not. So I believe that it could have a thriving FB group with people that wanted more control over their WordPress sites. For me, it seems to be in the perfect middle of handcoding and WP builders. The ability to create a WP theme from it is very exciting and gives me more control than a builder. At the very least, it place to build your CSS grid for the time being.

I will check out the Slack channel, as well.

Pinegrow needs a Facebook channel,
like a Duck needs a canoe…

I’m also a member of that Facebook group, and honestly, much like the Slack channel, I don’t have the time for it. I’m working a lot, this is a full-time career for me, and there’s less camaraderie across Slack and more “help me” or “teach me how to code” posts and I simply can’t afford to answer those very often. I do keep up with most threads and also read these forums, but it’s different than a forum with peers talking about tricky situations with the tool or coding problems, it feels more like Stack Overflow, if that makes sense.

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I understand, dcneuts, and I am probably one of those guys asking questions that you are referring to. As a “creative” trying to code, I spend a lot of time on YouTube, Udemy, etc so I (hopefully) can ask better questions. I have no doubt that I will progress fast.

As I work through the low hanging fruit, I am creating a Trello board that can act as a reference for people that are newer to Pinegrow (and coding) that will cut down on the same questions being repeated. I am doing this because I know it will help people that learn like I do.

From a different perspective, I have witnessed the power of a strong Facebook page and the effect it can have on a brand. I come from Oxygen. Their FB group is, by far, their most popular means of communicating and has brought many new customers to the platform. Because of what PG is, there is obviously going to be a huge mix of people with varying knowledge. I believe that many people will be in that flux state of learning because Pinegrow is kind of the answer to the problem of “I love the builder idea but I want to know more about coding”. Pinegrow is not an easy thing to wrap around for that demographic but it is very exciting. I believe that I strong, more active, FB page will bring more clients to Pinegrow as it has for Oxygen. And, of course, the FB group does act as an unofficial technical support arm for any company.

I do respect and am grateful for the forum. Facebook just increases the odds of someone interacting. Anyway, I hope you will stay a member of the FB page and offer your knowledge when you feel it is applicable.

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There are inherent limitations to a FB channel. You can’t post code in this manner

border: 1px solid red;
font-size: 1.5 rem;

You can’t easily quote previous posts

You can’t do BOLD or italic for emphasis

and so on.

Facebook is a poor substitute for a purpose-designed forum. Also, a lot of people just hate Facebook on principle. Privacy issues for one. They don’t want to be data for a faceless megacorp, or worry about their account info appearing for sale on some darknet website.

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Thanks for the feedback. I recently stumbled on a Reddit group, I think I’m the third member now. :wink:

You make some good points and I am happy there is a forum. The only issue for me is the lack of activity. With Oxygen, often a question will be answered within minutes with a discussion to follow. The Oxygen FB group is the central catalyst for sales, as well. FB can be a great discovery tool for Pinegrow and I hope that happens because this program is so exciting because of its position in the market.

All valid points, but kind of missing the Elephant in the room.

Excellent Documentation.

This is our bugbear. Raising awareness of a product is one thing,
Stimulating sales is another,
Colloboration and sharing, great
but as you have noted, by creating a Trello board to solve repeating queries

We have. choke point.

Effective Delivery of Documentation.

If you are creating a Trello board, people are answering on Slack, Others Writing *how do I , I’m new to all this * sort of questions on here,
Many people asking many both basic and advanced questions…

Creating a FUBook group…is yet another …place…to reinvent the wheel,
And possibly yes, introduce many more people. Possibly.
who

whill ask more questions.
Choke point!

I spent a lot of time on here helping as have several others, @dcneuts Is the resident WP God on Slack Channel (hi you!) I dont go over there much as the helpful posts dissapear as we have gone of the free 10,000 posts limit many moons ago, so . I see it as pointless as a reference, but useful for quick response fixes.
however, that doesnt often appear to be the case.
its odd, the more users we have there, the quieter it became… strange phenomena, sort of mirrored here.

So in my (who does he think he is?) opinion,
It would be better to spend time curating GOOD, orderly documentation for ALL THE 3 MAIN FLAVOURS
OF Pinegrow documentation.

2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, since there have been so many and such awesome advances in UI and UX with regards the app - but also totally confusing or impossible to follow along with if you are using a different version.
This way you can find the instruction you need for the version you have.
Application advances have outstripped the documentation advances. some versions ago

Curate these in unison with the collection of mostly excellent youtube vids on the channel,
finish the NEW docs (ie, trying finding anything on template parts…a big feature apparently.

Here you go, hows. your latin?
https://docs.pinegrow.com/?s=template+parts

there is a LOT of very good information on the OLD docs sites,

SO I often direct people there, but, they have never been unified with the new docs and
of course, dont cover the new features.

so before you start ANOTHER social media PineFrenzy, just consider…
who is going to run it?
WHAT are they gong to reference? WHERE is the authoritative docs to say *DO IT THIS WAY :slight_smile: *

because , you will find, as I have , that you are going to be doing an aweful lot of typing out of answers you cant find, or directing to out of date docs.
Again…and again…an again.
with each new feature things change. which is great! but you have to explain the different versions as
often you can find docs on it.

SO if. you’re not a master and prepared to give up your time, please dont make another doorway for
Hi, Im totally new to this, Ive just installed Wordpress and created my first theme, but how do I adjust the heading

As If they cant find it in the docs, or at least TRY and THINK about if first… please god, some people start to think… and then if there are NO docs… WHO is going to be answering all this stuff.

As you have found out on Slack ,it becomes a full time job. I can spend HOURS a day on here.
Researching, copying and pasting, searching docs, screen captures, editing them, sticking arrows on things and text boxes…creating videos…

This is where my web time goes. I learn off this Forum, which is great, I help on this forum, which is satisfying and I learn as I do it.

I build no web sites.

I have no time!
It is spent on this forum.

SO if you want to run. facebook group,
Stop creating websites, as. you will have no time to do so,
You will ,apparently, become our Trelllo Guru :slight_smile:Great! I’m sure we need one
(ps, what’s trello?)

and become very familiar with our docs… and note the missing gaps and
Maybe draw attention to them and do something about that first, before opening another hole in the Q/A docs pipeline.

There, that’s my long version of the duck/canoe thing :slight_smile:

and its now too late to start a website ,spent ages on here, and still have a bit to go.
not been here much as am now busy with horses in the real world :slight_smile:
Odd but satisfying :slight_smile:

With Oxygen, often a question will be answered within minutes with a discussion to follow

That is how it was some years ago on Slack. Then I saw no point in a forum.
oops, that changed when Useful. pinned slack postings started to disappear.
now, the more users we have, the quieter it’s become.
Exclusivity had its bonus’.

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The idea of any group is to help others. My point was not to disparage any other group or forum. Slack is like Twitter in that it is so hard to keep up with. FB is easy to interact and easy to search. Obviously you don’t care for it. I’m good with that and I appreciate your input in the forum.

Perhaps I am being selfish because of how much I have learned on the Oxygen FB group. Their forum is crickets and they tell people to go to the Facebook page because the action is there and, quite frankly, others do much of their customer support with the many discussions being had. They are over 7000 people with a decent amount of people that are active. It is a healthy learning environment.

I do not know who is going to be the guru in the private FB group (which was already started) but I do know that we can help each other and get better along the way AND bring more people to this amazing product.

So, this is not a “FB is better than x” statement. As I have stated before, I know there are more people like me that are in the middle of a builder and hand coding and PG ( I feel) is the answer. Those people are not going to find PG on the forum or Slack because they have no reason to be there. On Facebook, there is a lot of cross-talk and that will only help Pinegrow. I think some Oxygen people like me bought PG because of CSS Grid and it is something we discussed in the Oxygen group with the owner’s blessing as these products can coexist. Anyway, we all have our preferred methods, I guess. I will do each of them. I look forward to quickly becoming a guru and helping others.

But right now, I need to go learn about how components works with WordPress or if they even do! The PG documentation is a challenge. :slight_smile:

well I’m with you on the last point.
ie
https://docs.pinegrow.com/?s=components

… so lots of people muddling their way and committing

DRY
dont repeat yourself
In pursuit of the ultimate Answer… the missing Source Documentation.
every portal, doing the same thing, due to missing or out of date docs. which is sometimes exasperating as there is so much other good stuff there. just not collated.

and finally, as @Printninja put so well, a lot of the dev types here…are fully aware of tech man…
And tracking and social profiling and data logging and and and

and so, wouldn’t touch facebook with a barge pool
I will never go there, but good luck if. you go for it, but bear in mind the Big ELEPHANT in the room
ive drawn attention too. it might be a wise idea to do likewise too.

and finally, its not the platform, or the medium,
it’s the users themselves that make a community happen/work whatever.
and in this case a desire to better themselsves/ better the understanding of this great app, showcase, whatever.

There are already many users here, but not exactly a HUGELY thriving activity.
SO I may be wrong ,maybe Slimebook is a different way to go with a different userbase that are more social and …tracked.
But see how the existing facebook group is doing already maybe.
not sure Ive never been to it,

ah welll< I’m sure it will all come out in the wash and the best way forward will be arrived at and us naysayers may be incinerated like the dinosaurs we are :slight_smile:

Or maybe oxygen users are just different to pinegrow users and therefor, more likely to be FB active anyway.
only one way to find out. Start using the FB group and report back>
and it would be great to see. you Trello board thing when its done :slight_smile: I have no idea about that so something new and shiny to look at :slight_smile:Thanks

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I loved the elephants in the Jungle Book which my daughter made me watch 100+ times. I am documenting what I am learning on Trello for me and I will share it if I can make it presentable so someone like me can understand it. I need to have something to refer to and what I learn will, at least, be up to date. Pinegrow is for a specific type. I don’t see it going nuts simply because you have to work for it if you want to use with WP. There is a curve so I do not see the FB group getting out of hand.

I’m wondering if I can use components for WP outside of Bootstrap. I only want to do CSS Grid with Flexbox. About to go watch the WordPress videos again to catch what I missed last time. :slight_smile:

Well, not really no.
as they are BOOTSTRAP components.
that is, created with bootstrap css., made from Bootstrap stuff, stylings, actions etc.JS and things
so if. you have NO bootstrap … included source files, (css JS etc) then they will fall to bits when You try using them, they simply wont appear correctly (ie, not BS margins, colours etc etc)
or you could just replicate all the BS stylings and actions in your own stylesheet, or remove ALL the other stylings not used. but all seems like a lot of effort, why not just include it?

nb, now 3.30 am here and now have to go be active on and replay to posts not eh FB group :smiley:
not.
nighty night

When you read this tomorrow, you missed my point or I wrote it incorrectly (most likely). At this moment I am not sure if components work outside of Bootstrap. For instance, can I create components if I am doing a static site? So my thought was maybe I could create these reusable sections and apply them to my WP theme without Bootstrap. I do not want the extra code Bootstrap brings and I want to have that flexibility of arranging things in different media queries. This should probably be another thread!

I’m not at all familiar with Oxygen, but one of the things that makes Pinegrow less “newbie-friendly” is that it’s really geared towards people who have an understanding of how HTML and CSS work. Pinegrow allows you to do so much that not having a basic familiarity with how websites are coded can make the program seem overwhelming. Not to mention, it’s very easy to “break” things in Pinegrow because it doesn’t stop you from deleting whatever you want. The “undo-redo” feature is kinda half-baked as well, which doesn’t help things.

A lot of the questions I’ve answered here are from people who’ve figured out how to start building a page in Pinegrow, but then they get stuck because they don’t know how to code, so they don’t understand what’s going on “behind the scenes.” So my answer is often, “you need to learn HTML/CSS” which is not what people looking for a “website builder” want to hear. I’ve told people more than once, “if you’re not willing to learn HTML/CSS, you might be better off with using Wix or Weebly or even Webflow.”

But of course those are more costly routes, and more restrictive.

I would describe Pinegrow as more of an HTML/CSS Editor than a Website Builder, though you can of course build sites with it.

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It is high time for Pinegrow stuff to work on detailed and up-to-date documentation.
Having to ask questions that otherwise official and well organized resources could awnswer is not acceptable anymore. We all love Pinegrow but love, as you know, is not enough after some time.
I while back I sent a mail to the support asking for the documentation on working with @media queries on PG. Still no reply.
this is the only info I found on PG https://pinegrow.com/search?s=Media+queries.
PG has been improving impressively over the last years but need to be documented at the same pace.
Ovviusly this carence (might be) is because little internal resources and this lack of internal resources is plain simple… small numbers…
Perhaps going social could help speed up in this sense… (and hey kids, don’t worry, your pg app would still be your niche pro tool …) that with dense docs and resources.
On the light of what has been said, any additional mean and channel is well welcomed IMO.
cheers.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/162727434398763/

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And I would absolutely add the must of understanding WP under the hood. I am one of those guys that is really working over time to catch up on knowledge that would make me more proficient in building sites which is why you will see many questions from me coming up.

I believe there will be many people at/or near my level of knowledge because Pinegrow is an “aha” moment program that just floors you with what it can do. Without my efforts to understand WP PHP, the videos about Pinegrow > WP do not stick at all. Not a chance. So there will also be more aha moments when it comes to HTML/CSS. Finding out about CSS variables was a great aha moment completely unrelated to Pinegrow. Someone from the FB group pointed me towards the direction of CSS-Tricks for keeping the footer at the bottom of the page via CSS Grid. Cool stuff.

I watched the newer WP videos last night and just shook my head at what could be achieved. About to watch it again so I can take notes this time and be.able to help impart what I learn to people like me.

The search function in the forum is not the greatest and it really hurts in the documentation. I find some things more easily searching “Pinegrow, x” in Google.

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