[wp-hackers] Let's discuss custom post types and taxonomies.

[John Blackbourn]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 5:27 PM, scribu <scribu at gmail.com> wrote:
> Instead of complaining that it's not good enough, why don't you help out by
> submitting patches, correcting the information in the Codex etc. ?

Kris isn't complaining, he's garnering discussion (hence the thread
title). There's really no need for a response like this.


Kris, your observations are correct. There are a couple of issues at hand:

1. Custom post types are relatively new (especially their powerful
additions in 3.0) and therefore things like documentation in the Codex
haven't yet been updated. As Scribu pointed out, there are some great
tutorials on the subject (Justin Tadlock's being particularly good
examples) so it really needs the best and most relevant information
from these tutorials, and those with knowledge about custom post
types, to add this information to the Codex.

2. Custom post types are really simple to implement (using
register_post_type()) but of course there's much more to it than that.
You need a reasonable working knowledge of WordPress in order to
actually do something with your post types, and what you do with them
(and therefore what else you need to know about WordPress) is
dependent entirely on what your custom post type is and what it's
going to do. As you pointed out "It gives you scope to do virtually
anything with this software" so there's not really one single place to
start when explaining how to create a powerful custom post type
implementation. The more complex your custom post type is the more
you'll probably need to know about WordPress in order to achieve it.
It's never going to be *really* easy (although we'd all love to make
it as easy as possible).

So really, it all comes back to documentation. The bane of open source
software development. There is some effort to improve documentation in
the current improvements being made to the wordpress.org website, but
I'm not sure of the scope. I think we're also hoping to do a bit of a
documentation drive at some point (it was brought up on the wp-docs
mailing list anyway) but again I'm not sure of the scope.

John