[wp-hackers] Developer portal

[Arne Brachhold]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 21:37, Matt Mullenweg <m at mullenweg.com> wrote:
> If there were to be a developer portal for WordPress, someplace where if
> you're first getting started with hacking on WP, building plugins, creating
> themes, you could go and it'd have all the best resources in one place, what
> resources do you think would be important to have there?

I really like the style of php.net, what about a combination of the
phpDoc and additional information? The phpDoc itself is lacking of
examples how different functions work together, additional tutorials
or more complex examples may easily get outdated or wont't provide
enough technical information (which the phpDoc might have).

So what I would like to have is:

* A clean documentation divided in major topics, for example: "WP
Query", "Database Access", "Security" or "Configuration" with simple
tutorials and "Howtos".
* Links to the corresponding phpDoc functions in each topic in case
you need more technical details
* A usable search engine, which finds what I search for (or even what
I didn't). If I search on php.net for "get_property" I also get the
results for "get_properties", "reflectionproperty" etc.
* A list of hooks divided into categories (for example "posts",
"comments") so I know where to look (since the hooks are not always
properly named).
* Revisions? It must be clear in the examples and tutorials in which
WP version they work. I like the MSDN or Symfony style where I can
switch within different (.Net / Symfony) versions of the same topic.
* Separated languages. It's nice if somebody translated the English
articles, but I don't want to see the same documentation in 30
languages in the search results.

What I really don't like about the current codex:
* Not well structured / linked / organized
* Bad search result
* Often outdated
* Hard to handle and edit

Regardless of how this could be implemented, I think a combination of
wiki style articles, "best practices", examples and generated phpDoc
would be quite easy to use and understand.

Regards,

-- Arne