OK, I don't know Tealium, but together we should be able to cross reference our experiences and find a way to get you up and running.
At a base minimum, here is a basic description of the elements:
Rules
This is basically your triggers, conditions and actions. Example, on Window Loaded (trigger), where Page is X (optional condition), Do "Something" or multiple things (these can be run sequentially or in parallel)
Data Elements
These are basically your variables.. They can be simple items (pull a cookie/storage value, take the value from a JS variable/object on the page, set a constant value, Page Info (host, path, referrer, etc), or you can get fancy and use JS to process data and return a value, etc)
Extensions
These are basically modules that you can add to your site. So Core is standard and installed by default, but you can then add Adobe Analytics or WebSDK, Visitor ID Service, Multimedia, you can even do Google Analytics, or other potential integrations, there are also just "helper" extensions that allow you leverage functionality for your Data Elements (i.e. There is a Lookup Table utility, or a Product String utility if you don't want to write the JS yourself). I suggest starting with the basics of what you need then add as you need... most of the extensions you can do with straight JS if you are comfortable with coding...
To start, you are probably going to want these Extensions as a minimum:
- Core (pre-installed)
- Experience Cloud ID Service
- Adobe Analytics / Adobe Experience Platform Web SDK (depending on if you want to do WebSDK or not)
If you are using the Adobe Data Layer, then you will also want Adobe Client Data Layer...
I normally start an implementation by starting to create my repository of Data Elements (you can test the values using your Browser Console even before you create any rules or tracking)
// in the console
_satellite.getVar('Data Element Name');
You can check that your values are being set correctly.
Then you can start with a simple rule, setting basic values, and test to make sure that things are looking good.
Once you have the basic rules down, you can work on the rest of what you need, testing periodically.
It's definitely in your best interest to make sure that your QA/Dev environment is set to use the Dev Environment code, this is the easiest to push incremental changes to for testing. If you have a Staging environment you would set that to the Staging Code, and your Prod obviously set to Prod.... and hopefully you have at least a Prod and Testing Suite to send the data to (I send Dev and Staging to my QA Suite, and Prod to my prod suite)
We can go a lot deeper into this, but this should help get you started.
