The Concrete CMS forums are the obvious place to ask questions about Concrete CMS. The community is generally pretty friendly, especially if you put a bit of homework in to researching your question before asking it. To quote another Concrete CMS developer:

"If you expect us to put in some work answering your question, you're going to have to show that you did some work to ask it."

Don’t forget that many questions you may ask on the forums are already covered by the Documentation and by Tutorials, or may have already been answered if you search back through the forums.

For more general questions about HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript and computers generally, Stack Overflow is a great resource with vastly more information available to search through or ask new questions. Stack Overflow also provides some essential guidance on how to ask questions on a forum that is equally applicable to asking questions on Concrete CMS.

These days, asking an AI such as Copilot can also provide a quick answer, or help you to better formulate your question. Beware that forums get a lot of AI generated spam questions, so don't just post an AI generated text into the forum as it will likely get rejected as spam.

Describing a problem can often be easier with a screenshot. If the problem involves run-time errors, diagnosis may be helped by further Diagnostic Information.

  • Ask your question politely and as clearly as you can.
  • Show you thought it through before asking it.
  • Avoid questions that boil down to 'Can you do my homework for me?'
  • Don't try and bully others into helping, you have no innate right to help.
  • Attach screenshots where they help clarify. 
  • If an error is involved, attach relevant Diagnostic Information (but don't swamp your post with too much information).
  • Respect that others put work into answering, even if they don't provide a solution.
  • If there is an addon that does what you need, don't expect a developer to put more work than the value of the addon into telling you how to do it for free!

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Discussion

If you would like to discuss any of these thoughts, please start or continue a thread on the Concrete CMS Forums.

This text is loosely based on and updated from a HowTo I wrote soon after becoming involved with Concrete CMS, with input from some great developers of the time.

You can easily pick out where I have inserted at least one section of updated information.