I find myself wanting to give tips to the community when I or some of the team at Bold Tech find hidden features / find a workflow pattern that makes sense.
I find that discussion isn't the right section for this, and I know there is a tips and tricks tag, but I think a tips category would get a lot of hits / give Retool more insight into common work patterns within the platform.
Hey @JoeyKarczewski ! Love this -- super cool that you and the team commonly find yourselves wanting to share workflow patterns and hidden features you find really useful
I agree, Discussion feels too general... I'd suggest Community Show & Tell ! There's room for both showcase-type content and "showing & telling" more granular tips, like your own building discoveries/advice/best practices. We could use the tips-and-tricks tag you mentioned to distinguish within that category, and could create other tags in contrast like showcase or similar for other kind(s) of content?
Speaking of "hidden features" - for some Retool Community Forum history...
If you look at the URL of the Community Show & Tell category, its URL slug is `tips-and-tricks` :sweat_smile: which I believe indicates it was called that at one point in time.
Later it got named Community Show & Tell to emphasize showcasing and collective crowd-sourcing from the community, in contrast to Retool Tips & Tricks directly from Retool folks.
The description encourages "best practices, workarounds, code snippets, or whatever has helped you build interesting Retool apps."! Interestingly this doesn't currently describe the "show us what use cases you've built on Retool" type of posts we've loved seeing so many of from the community lately!!
And this description topic is not always easy to find - you can see it on hover, but I believe it's pinned to the top of the category list, only until you've viewed it.
What do you think, would adding tips & tricks topics to Community Show & Tell work for now? Seems like folks go to that category for inspiration on both "the art of the possible", and to tactically learn what other builders have learned / built / found useful in Retool, like @dcartlidge 's discovery of how to leverage our Debug feature when it was still pretty new!
Part of our balance here is managing sprawl of Categories. There's also the concept of sub-categories which we've not yet delved into much. We can keep that in our back pocket for organizing different types of forum content as well.
cc @sarahs our Community Growth Manager who focuses all of her time on growing our community and continuously improving our contributor experience. (Btw we've both been loving the Community End of Year Survey submissions from you all!) . Sarah and I talked about your ideas here today -- thanks again for expressing them here!! Keep the community sharing + building ideas coming
@JoeyKarczewski sounds good, glad you're planning to add more tips in Show & Tell!
So, that Retool Tips & Tricks section is its own separate category. It's expected that it exists in addition to Community Show & Tell I believe both of them have existed in parallel since Jan 2023 when we opened Retool Tips and Tricks as a space for Retool employees to share tips from us! The Community Show & Tell category pre-dates Retool Tips & Tricks - but it used to be calledTips & Tricks itself I know this is a somewhat complicated forum category backstory. Thanks for looking out!
We're open to hearing more ideas and also will monitor how things are going with Community Show & Tell to see what more content organization/tagging it might need