[wp-hackers] Developer portal

[Nathan Rice]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Matt Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

Indeed. That's why I suggested a voting system where users could vote on
what tutorial best explained the function. Outdated tutorials could easily
be "voted off" in favor or new ones. If the tutorials are out of date, then
any blogger can fire up his editor and make a new one that IS up to date.

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.)


That's a worthy goal, but I'd cite the Codex as a good example of
centralized, collective, voluntary documentation not working like one would
hope it would. This despite the many campaigns to encourage people to
contribute to it.


> 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 they were on his site, and then they got out of date and no one else updated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."
>

See my note on the community voting on the best 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),
>

Mine too. But I'd be careful to not assume this is the position of the
people you hope will provide the documentation for you and the WP community
at large.


>
> 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.



Yeah, you're probably right. I don't doubt that there would still be a
vibrant community of people writing tutorials on their own blogs. Given the
wealth of information that is created DAILY on WP-centric blogs, it makes
sense to leverage all that hard work, doesn't it? Perhaps even encourage it?

Again, I'll cite the Codex as an example of hoping people will voluntarily
contribute to a central tutorial/documentation repository as a pipe dream.
 Whereas we have good evidence to suggest that traffic is a proven
enticement for frequent, high quality documentation.