Welcome SDL Community, to the SDL Tridion Community, a collection of consultants, developers, and customers with experience ranging from a few days-to-a-few decades of Tridion.

A few members of the SDL Tridion community have asked about the SDL Community's value. It has to meet high expectations as the latest "official" community site after SDL Tridion World, the Tridion Forum, and Tridion Ideas. Being introduced more than a year after the Tridion Stack Exchange Beta among dozens of personal Tridion-related blogs and open source projects makes SDL Community's role even less clear.

By Midas Rule, the Tridion part of SDL Community will be what you make of it. In this opinion piece I describe past community sites, what each may have historically offered, and potential opportunities for the SDL Community site.

SDL Tridion World

SDL Tridion World hosted SDL Tridion extensions and featured articles and tutorials. As the official community site, it showcased expertise and code for the community.

In the last few years, two things changed for Tridion World and the rest of the World:

• Blogs! The number of community blogs increased several-fold, as many CMS professionals started their own sites in the wake of "Web 2.0" (revisit Michael Wesch's The Machine is Us/ing Us video for inspiration). Why submit an article when it was easy enough to self-publish?
• Code. Tridion Extensions grew and were adopted faster than the Tridion World "showcase" model.

From the Razor Mediator to DD4T, extension creators often worked directly with the community and Tridion clients were opting for practical, open source solutions that met their needs. I've had customers cite this active community as one of their reasons for choosing Tridion. The conversation has change from, "yeah, there's an extension for that" to customers actively asking about such extensions.

In some ways the World was not enough.The extensions not only needed code repositories, but also separate discussion forums. Within SDL, a few of us wondered what to do with "new" technologies. Does SDL Media Manager need its own forum or community site? You can't ask Media Manager questions on Tridion Stack Exchange.

Here are some opportunities for SDL Community, as a "replacement" for SDL Tridion World:

• Announce, discuss, and reference your favorite open source projects. Describe and discuss events. Reference things like the Tridion Cookbook, the "4T" extensions, or your latest work.
• Post articles on an official site.
• Do more than Tridion. This is the World of SDL, not just Tridion. SDL Community has a place for SDL Media Manager and other SDL technologies or solutions.

SDL Tridion Forum

I understand the Forum was an experiment of sorts started around 2001 that actually predates SDL Tridion World. I asked Nakele Obleton, long-time Tridionaut who argued for the creation of the forum for her thoughts about it, some 14 years later. She shared the following:

"In the early days, the onboarding process for a Tridion technical consultant was a training class that included a review of the basics of BluePrinting, content modeling, and a few sample code snippets for templating.

Inevitably, once onsite at a client, the consultant would need help or advice. Topics ranged from the installation process, how to modify and use the default templates, or complex ideas on how to customize the GUI, extend the API, and develop custom solutions.

The senior consultants in the field didn't have time for knowledge sharing and customer support was not staffed to help consultants in addition to supporting their external customers.

After discussing a few options, it seemed logical to store this information online where internal and external consultants could access it.

The challenge was to identify a solution that would require minimal support, include security to control access, and allow for moderation by super users."

The forum answered lots of questions from behind a login. Some complained about slow search but I think Google changed our expectations of "search." I personally owe my current role with SDL to things I learned and shared on that forum (thanks for that, Nakele and all the others that taught me something on there).

The questions part have since been replaced with SDL Tridion Stack Exchange which focuses on answerable, objective questions. But until SDL Community, there hasn't been an official place for discussions and opinions since the forum was closed.

The topics and discussion points were not predestined or predefined.

Here are some opportunities for SDL Community and discussions, especially in relation to Tridion Stack Exchange and the closed forum:

• Ask questions that are not a good fit (are not welcome) on Tridion Stack Exchange.
• Discuss more than Tridion. This is the World of SDL, not just Tridion.

SDL Tridion Ideas

SDL Tridion Ideas is a way to offer product feedback to SDL. As a community website that collects submissions, rewards ideas with peer-contributed comments and points, it may have been ahead of its time. Its wizard-based based interface may seem dated compared to an interface like Stack Exchange, but it's nice to see your name next to a product release.

I was definitely not the only one to suggest a "skinable interface" (which was possible in Tridion R5.3), but I can claim credit for it.

Opportunities for SDL Community, with a site already dedicated to product feedback:

• Announce, discuss, and reference your favorite SDL Tridion ideas on an SDL site.
• Solicit feedback from other customers, implementers, and those that build or support the solutions.
• Post or share implementation examples.
• Do more than Tridion. This is the World of SDL, not just Tridion.

SDL Community

As a community platform that just started, SDL Community has parts that overlap, but also compliment, past official community sites.

It doesn't completely replace your contributions, but rather it's a place to connect with the larger SDL community, see the community from a single URL, and watch and discuss the community and products as they continue to evolve.

Here's my personal view on sharing, which may evolve as things continue to change:

• SDL Community for guidance, white papers, basic how-to tutorials and more involved pieces
• My personal blog for funny, personal, opinion-based, and less official information including the occasional "note to self"
• Technical examples and code might go on TridionDeveloper, videos on YouTube, and maybe surveys on Linked-In
• Tridion Stack Exchange for Tridion Q&A

What about this irreverent, possibly irrelevant rant of post? Having some of the World's top Tridion sharers ask me what to do with the new site, I think this falls under important.

By Midas Rule, do whatever you'd like with SDL Community. My next steps are learning more and starting the 5 Stages all over again, but with more than Tridion. This is the World of SDL, not just Tridion.