tlienart
commented
2 years ago Hey Stephan, no problem, I know it's not always a smooth ride and thanks for giving it a fair shot already.
Some notes:
- given the issues you opened here (thanks for those btw, it's always helpful), you're using a lot of 'advanced' features of Franklin; not that these shouldn't be used, but rather that the docs for those is less present and, as far as I could see, the issues you have are often about expecting X to work but in fact there's Y that could have been used instead.
For this, it's always the same; having patient users help me extend the docs is how things can become better.
- with respect to other users, there's basically two groups of users: those who don't leverage a lot of the features like
lx*orhfun*; for those "things generally work" and when it doesn't they shoot a message on Slack and it usually gets solved very quickly. This group includes the 'big' users you listed (Julia website, etc) and the second are people who do used the advanced features like you or the guy behind the Makie docs, and these people do run into issues because they use things that have been used less and are documented less. I typically try to help these people pretty actively and respond quickly (as I think you saw). The hope is that these people help me by trying stuff out and making suggestions for better docs or for better code.
A final note is that I'm working on a very big refactoring as I think I've mentioned in another issue; this also means that I'm not actively working on the current version (apart from fixes) because I'd like things to "keep working" for people who use Franklin now and have something they're happy with. The next version will certainly not be perfect but will address a bunch of the issues you've opened recently. One thing to understand is that the initial design of Franklin had a simpler use case in mind but slowly people started using some more advanced stuff to a point which now suggests some core re-design for improved use.
This is a lot of work, and while the main building blocks are in place, there's still a lot of details to finalise before I can offer this for people to beta-test.
Anyway, I understand that things can be frustrating and I apologise; if you want to help me out with adding comments in the docs, this will be much appreciated. I'd also suggest you join the slack #Franklin channel to get help quicker than here (even though in some cases your issues are good reminders that I have to improve the docs on XYZ).
schlichtanders
I don't know where to place this, probably nowhere, but I hope it is still somehow valuable to know how painful it is to use Franklin.jl right now
unfortunately when I am working with Franklin, once a week, or more often, I am hitting some bug-like missing feature (something I expect just works) or a plain bug. Everytime something does not work, Franklin plainly crashes, which makes the process of working with Franklin quite difficult.
This state of franklin is quite unexpected given that so many users uses it and even juliacomputing uses Franklin.
I am sorry for these words of sorrow, but with every such issue I feel like I better had used something more mature than Franklin and am now developing Franklin instead of my webpage. However I wanted to make use of Julia in case I need it. Was a difficult decision and probably I already went to far and will stay with Franklin despite all these difficulties.
I would love seeing Franklin more userfriendly in this regard. My excuses for the hard words, still they may give some valuable insights into the user perspective.