February 13, 2012 at 10:50 UTC Dave Houlker proposed a new site idea on Area 51, the Stack Exchange Network staging zone.

Today, March 13, 2013 after 22 days of private beta, the new Tridion Stack Exchange site is now open to the public!

While we bring out the champagne, I would like to point out that this site was proposed by a community member and made possibly by the entire SDL Tridion community. So the credit of getting this far belongs to all those that participate.

But our journey does not end here, nor can we rest on our laurels. The endeavor has just begun, now is the time for everybody to step up to the plate and help out to make this site a success. Or as the Stack Exchange Team said it: “We’re off to a good start, and it’s time to unleash this baby on the public and see if it flies.” (they apologized for their mixed metaphor, but I actually found it quite striking).

For the past year we have been busy with getting the Tridion – Stack Exchange proposal passed, and in the mean time everybody started asking their SDL Tridion related questions on all the other Stack Exchange sites, mainly Stack Overflow. Now that the proposal is passed and the site is in public beta, we can really start building the community from a single location.

“What can you do to help?”, I hear you ask. That is simple, just go to http://tridion.stackexchange.com, sign up/login with your existing Stack Exchange, Google, or Facebook account and participate. As a new user, you will want to start with reading the Frequently Asked Questions and then take a look around the site. If you have a question (any question) about SDL Tridion, be it related to templating, something to do with the event system, or even a question about how to implement and use DD4T (the open source framework which links Tridion to your MVC web application architecture), just ask it on there.

The site is moderated by the community, so if you make a mistake or ask questions which are considered off topic, your question will be flagged, possibly down voted and you might get comments/remarks on what you did wrong. But don’t let this stop you, we welcome new users and it is natural to make mistakes. The only thing not tolerated is rudeness, and that applies to established users just as well.

After you have started asking questions of your own, you will have seen the questions others asked. Some of these you might even have an answer to, in that case, be sure to add that answer. Even if the question already has been answered by somebody, if you feel that you have a better/different answer, go ahead and add it. The community (together with the questioner) will vote on all the given answers, and the questioner will eventually accept one of the given answers. It is considered healthy for a question to get multiple answers, so we urge you to do so.

I will end this blog post with a big Thank You to all that helped making this site possible, and hope to see your questions and answers on TRex.