How to get the most out of posting on Dev Community!

Hey Community,

Do you want to get help, discuss an interesting feature, make an announcement or share your knowledge? In this post, we will tell you how to do it all.

To make it easier to navigate this "how to" just follow the contents:

• General guidelines
• Question
• Article or Announcement
• Discussion

General guidelines

To begin, you need to click on the "New post" button in the top menu of the Developer Community site:

After that, you will see the editor that will give you the choice of creating a Question, an Announcement, an Article, or a Discussion. Different types of posts have their own sets of mandatory and optional fields. 

First, let's talk about the common fields for all types of posts and then move on to particulars.

Basically, every post has a Title*, Body*, Group*, Tags, and some additional options where you can add a poll or attach PDF file(s). All the text fields marked with asterisks (*) are mandatory. So first, you need to choose the type of the post, it can be as mentioned above a Question, an Announcement, an Article, or a Discussion.

Next, please formulate the main idea of your question in the most precise and concise way and write it down as a Title.  

After that, in the Body, you write whatever you want to share with others. There are two options to choose from when writing the text of your post. You can either use editor WYSIWYG or Markdown. Both of them will get you the same thing as a result, of course.

vs. 

After you're done writing the text, you have to choose the Group, which is usually the technology, product, or service provided by InterSystems. 

After the Group field, there is a Tags field where you can add tags related to the contents of your post. There are quite a few tags so please choose responsibly because others use these tags to look for or sort the information when they are searching for something.

Underneath the Tags, there is a link to see more options. There you can Attach a pdf document (for example, the timetable of the event in pdf format) and provide the name you want to be displayed.

Another thing you can do via more options is Add a poll. Fill in the fields with a question, possible answers, choose duration, etc.

After you're done, you can Preview your post to see how it will look to others, you can Save it to keep editing later, or Publish it right away.

In addition, you can schedule a publication of your post. Just click on the down arrow, choose Schedule post, and set the date and time.

After all is set, just click on Schedule post and you're done. 

Basically, this is for the common functionality of creating a post.

Question

From the name of it, it's obvious that you should choose this type of post if you need someone's help. Here, in the Developer Community, there are a lot of specialists and someone may have already encountered the same situation. So don't hesitate to ask questions or answer them ;)

To ask for help, please formulate the main idea of your question and write it down as a title. Next, please select the Product version that you're using, because different versions have different functionality and classes and some advice could be useful for some versions and useless for others.

To be even more precise, you may provide a full build that you're currently using in the $ZV textbox. To get your full version you can open Terminal and execute the command:

write $ZV

The same can be done in IDE you're using or you can see it in the Management Portal:

The rest of the fields are the same as described before.

Article or Announcement

To share your knowledge or make an announcement you should choose a type of post Article or Announcement respectively. These types of posts apart from the common fields also have some additional ones. Those are Previous post, Next post, and Open Exchange application link.

So, basically, if this current article/announcement (or a branch of a discussion) is linked to another one, you can add the link in the field Previous post, and, as a result, other community members will see the following Related posts block at the end of the post.

You don't need to open the previous post and add the link to a Next post there, it will be done automatically.

You can also navigate easily from a post to another by using the navigate buttons which appear at the right top part of the linked articles.

        

If your post has a project on Open Exchange linked to it, you can add the link to this project in a respective field.

Discussion

To start a conversation about some feature or other or maybe share your experience with using the technology and ask for feedback you can start a Discussion. This type of post has all the common fields and also the links to Previous post and Next post.

This is it!

This is what you need to know to start a new thread on the Community. Good luck!

And we look forward to reading your thoughts ;)