Hello Martin and Jennifer,<br><br>I have also recently started using Wordpress and developing plugins for it as well. I really like the features of Wordpress and how clean and smooth it is. I did however have some of the same problems that Martin did in finding documentation. In writing a couple of plugin's, which I hope to release once I clean them up enough, I had a couple of ideas which I was thinking of working on and contributing to the documentation.
<br><br>1. A complete plugin example that is "perfect" in the eyes of Wordpress and if followed you will write excellent plugin's. What I am thinking is perfect syntax, layout, code style, and documentation. The document has snippets of code, but not a complete example. I typically follow example code when learning a new system, and didn't know what was good plugin code and bad plugin code in the eyes of the Wordpress development team.
<br><br>2. A 10 step guide (or how ever many steps are required) to writing a plugin. The writing a plugin page is a great start, but I was wanting to create my own table, and build a management page to manage that data. This is where I had to download a couple of other plugin's as examples and hope they are good examples of plugin style.
<br><br>As an example of the steps:<br><br>Step 1. Setup the meta information. Give example how to you construct the author info, author URL, description etc.<br><br>Step 2. Define your table definition and build the install function.
<br><br>Step 3. Write functions to display your data on a website.<br><br>Step 4. Administration functions. How to add, edit and delete data.<br><br>Step 5. Hooks and Filters. How to hook your plugin into the Wordpress engine.
<br><br>Step 6. Localization. How to localize your code.<br><br>Step 7. Documentation. How best to document your plugin so other's can use it.<br><br>I'm not sure if this is just a reorganization of existing information, or if it's something that should be written from scratch? I would be glad to help out with this if you would like. Having just written my first plugin's it's all still fresh in my mind.
<br><br>Thanks for all the great existing docs and spending your time working on them, it's very much appreciated.<br><br>Thanks!<br>Andrew.<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 2/21/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">
Jennifer Hodgdon</b> <<a href="mailto:yahgrp@poplarware.com">yahgrp@poplarware.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi Martin,<br><br>Excellent!<br><br>a) Rewriting the "Writing a Plugin" article was already at the top of<br>my To Do list. I might have time later this week. It is definitely a<br>bit disorganized, and it should reference (rather than duplicate) the
<br>Plugin API article.<br><br>b) I totally agree that there are a ton of pages that loop around<br>endlessly when you are trying to find documentation... believe me, the<br>situation was worse a month or two ago! But it still needs
<br>improvement. I've been focusing my efforts on improving the<br>organization of the developer-related documentation, removing<br>duplicated information, making central places to look for information,<br>etc. But more does need to be done. I've made notes of your specific
<br>points, but you can feel free to jump in and improve things too.<br><br>c) Function Reference:<br>> I'm not aware of the history of this page, but according to your<br>> reaction, I assume that in the past there was not such a reference.
<br><br>There was a reference page before, but it was missing about 75% of the<br>functions. Jump in and add documentation and organization at will!<br>Please! :) You also mentioned some kind of Table of Contents -- the<br>
Wiki makes it easy to add links down the page, so that can be added<br>too. Good idea!<br><br>d) Here are 3 places that I think need more documentation in the<br>developer reference area, if you want to help:<br><br>1) Function Reference - each function should at least have a short
<br>description, and better yet a documentation page. Better categories<br>might be useful too, or maybe listing functions in more categories.<br><br>2) Template Tags - add the rest of the functions from the<br>*-template.php
files, so that the lists are complete, and document<br>functions that are lacking documentation currently. Right now, only a<br>subset of the functions are on the page, and it seems quite arbitrary.<br>Note that some functions are on separate pages (like the Conditional
<br>Tags and the Include Tags).<br><br>3) Hooks list - document these hooks, perhaps organize them into<br>categories?<br><br> Jennifer<br>--<br>Jennifer Hodgdon<br><br>Poplar ProductivityWare * <a href="http://www.poplarware.com">
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