[wp-hackers] Developer portal

[Mike Schinkel]

On Dec 14, 2009, at 6:21 PM, Matt Mullenweg wrote:
> On 2009-12-14 2:48 PM, Nathan Rice wrote:
>> Not that it would matter if there were attribution. If a person writes good
>> WordPress tutorials, but they do it all at WordPress.org, then what does it
>> benefit them to have a link back to their blog?
> 
> It's true that when you contribute to WP it does require some sublimation of the ego. This is why you don't see developer names plastered all over the source code of core WP even when a class or function is largely the function of a single author. (In the beginning.)
> 
> The problem with offsite resources besides the sites change, shift, expire, redirect to porn, is that more fundamentally it's the product of a single person.
> 
> Much like canonical plugins, we want people to work together to create something better than they would be able to create on their own. (Just like WordPress works.) Our own Mark/Podz used to have fantastic tutorials on his site, but then he started to get overwhelmed with people contacting him for support because they were on his site, and then they got out of date and no one else updated them because they were "Mark's tutorials."
> 
> My favorite kind of attribution is collective, "we built this together." That's basically what we have on the wp.org about page now (though it's woefully incomplete),

To Nathan's point, Nathan writes because it gets him exposure which ultimately helps him pay his bills.  For entrepreneurs (vs. employees of some organization) that exposure *allows* them to continue contributing to the WordPress community.  Automattic, OTOH, is making money from all this so they don't feel the pain.

I have zero qualms about Automattic making money, it should, I just want everyone to realize that free help to WordPress grows Automatic's revenue but does absolutely nothing for those individuals whose bills are paid by the ability to get paying work because of their *visible* contribution. Not acknowledging that and not considering how to make it easier for those people to get business who have contributed seems very disingenuous to me.  (FWIW, I'm not putting myself in the same category as Nathan, I'm an outside observer from that respect.)

>  and what we've talked about for an easter egg credits page in WP core.

That's only an ego booster but wouldn't really bring clients in the door. 

> I fully expect there to be fantastic stuff posted on other sites just like there is today, just because we have some resources/tutorials/documentation on the official site doesn't mean the other stuff goes away.

No, but it lowers the traffic they will receive from Google by probably an order of magnitude. It greatly reduces their motivation to publish information about WordPress on their blog.

Basically I'm saying I think there needs to be a strategy to create a central repository *and* to give those guys lots of traffic to their blogs.  FWIW.

-Mike