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

[Kris Young]

Hi there John,

1) Indeed. I'd rather all posters were able to approach this level-headedly rather than jumping to conclusions as to my intentions with this post (without the opportunity to read the tonality or emotion behind it). I'd rather be discussing than arguing, otherwise I'd probably find myself posting under a different email address than one which holds me accountable to anything I say. I'd be grateful if you could bear these two things in mind scribu, and offer something constructive or skip the thread altogether.

2) It's a question of confidence I think. I don't know much about this feature despite implementing it successfully on two projects, as I copy-pasted from tutorials (to avoid complications in the face of a strict deadline). I don't think I'm comfortable right now with sharing my limited (and fragmented) knowledge on this subject with other people. It's like Chinese Whispers - it will only get worse, and I'll confuse more people than just myself.

3) It just seems a shame. It's a potentially brilliant feature (nobody can really dispute that) but it's locked away in the code. The main problems I had with this were at various unrelated points, namely in the difference between taxonomies and categories within custom post types (so terminology I guess) and the displaying of all my shiny new data. The final opinion on this is until I decide to look at it again in the future, and it's a firm opinion that this feature could be better. I actually do think that documentation would help someone in a similar position to myself - I will actually try and write something and run it by some people before I post it.

Thanks again John,

Kris

-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com on behalf of John Blackbourn
Sent: Wed 04/08/2010 18:15
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: Re: [wp-hackers] Let's discuss custom post types and taxonomies.
 
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
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