September 13th 2016 - this was the date that Sitecore Stack Exchange went public! We are more than 6 months down the line so here are some of the highlights of the first 6 months of the Sitecore Stack Exchagne Beta site.
Sitecore StackExchange - What is it?
If you are a developer and you live on planet Earth - you know what Stack Overflow is! Probably one of the most visited question and anwser sites for coding questions on the internet. The tagging features are great and for a while it was a great resource for asking #sitecore questions.
But StackOverflow has some strict rules about what makes a “good” question. Questions should be only about code, not opinion based, no questions on how to use parts of the CMS Admin tools etc…
So after a conversation on Slack (which if you haven’t joined yet… what are you playing at… join now!) Mark Cassidy started a new Stack Exchange site proposal for a dedicated Sitecore Q&A site This quickly grew into one of the fastest ever proposals to meet all the requirements to get into a private beta! After 30 days and a couple of “teething” issues we made it to public beta!
The new site allows for a lot more range in questions based around the whole Sitecore eco system. Not just limited to programming questions.
How is the Site doing?
As you can see from the above stats, we are doing really well as a community. We have a total of 1,768 users, on average we are getting over 100 new users sign up every month. Its also important that we have a good number of active users. These are users who’s reputation score is 200+. But we need more! if you have a sub 200 score - get active on the site! The more active users we have, the better the questions and answers will be, this benefits everyone.
With nearly 1400 visits per day, you can see that there is a vibrant community for Sitecore!
Also important is that as of today there have been 1,966 questions asked, with 89% of the questions have been answered!
Highlights
Best Answer/Most Viewed
Both the most viewed and most voted question on the site is How do you setup a 404 and 500 error page for missing files and media items? - with 32 votes just on the question asked by Michael West this was obviously something a lot of you guys wanted the answer too. 5 answers were made with some great content, but the epic by Justin Laster was a clear winner with 38 votes! This is also the most viewed question on the site with over 2.2k views todate!
Most Answers
The question with the most answers is What are some appropriate uses for Sitecore Data Providers asked by (techphoria414)[https://sitecore.stackexchange.com/users/248/techphoria414] - this is a great example of why we have the Sitecore specific site, on Stack Overflow this would have been shot down and closed right away, but now we have 10 answers providing some really nice insight into data providers that you would not have known about without this site. Great question Nick!
With 277 answers between them, your friendly SSE mods Mark Cassidy & Dmytro Shevchenko are the top contributers to the site, not just simple answers either - both have an average answer score close to 5 votes, thanks for all your hard work and effort on the site guys!
We also wouldn’t have the quality that the site has without the hard work of people editing and maintaining questions & answers - top marks to Corey Smith, Gatogordo & Pete Navarra - and to any that help with edits, reviews and answers etc…
Content
So what are people asking about? Well its probably no surprise that the wffm tag is one of the most used on the site, solr, glass-mapper and sxa are also popular choices, showing the wide variety of content already on the site.
The Future
The future is looking good for the Sitecore Stack Exchange site, but that future is entirely in your hands! Please visit the site, tell other developers about it - according to Sitecore there are over 10,000 certified developers out there, and less than 2k of them have found the site - if we grow this community it will only make it a better place for all of us. Tweet about it, if you see a question and know the answer… or even better, have time to research the answer - please add it. If you have found a solution to your problem on SSE and that has helped you… think how much your knowledge can help others.
For a while we were doing really well with over 10 questions per day and lots of answers, recently this has dropped off a bit - so we need you all to help the community out and provide a great online resource for Sitecore developers - lets make that future bright!