WordPress: “Too cool for documentation”
- 29th Jun 2007
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- Wordpress
I’m pissed off.
I’m trying to write a sidebar widget for the new WordPress. It’s a really simple widget, in fact it only has one option. Since widgets are part of WordPress now, naturally I thought - as the premier blogging platform, that I’d find some well-written API documentation on the codex detailing how to go about interfacing with the dynamic sidebar and admin section.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA
Yeah I was wrong.
In fact, the best I could come up with was an insultingly nonchalant overview at Automattic’s website along with some kind of excuse for an API.
I defy anyone to write a sidebar widget that works with the built-in widgets UIs using the information on these websites. I reckon you can get close but there’s bits of information missing about the admin panel. Apparently there’s some Google Search widget that you can look at that’s well-commented but I can’t find that anywhere within my WordPress source tree.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the laid-back “cool Web 2.0″ style but there are boundaries. And saying API Documentation is “for eggheads” is a bit childish, honestly.
6 Comments | Leave a comment »
yeah wordpress documentation sucks donkey balls. I find myself having to dig through the source just about everytime I write something for wordpress.
You should see some of those eggheads’ explanation for forcing non-www compliance in Wordpress mu. They quote no-www.org as an official source for the deprecation of http://www.
Haha Rob, been there done that too… Hate the documentation for widgets…
I tried and then hired a good coder for a tenner to do the job perfectly on my behalf. If you know your way around WP it’s easy. If you don’t its impossible.
I’m a big fan of WP.org but I find the lack of documentation a serious pain. There’s also some strange arguments (like Dax refers to) on their mailing lists.
Maybe it’s the old political answer: join their development team and try to nudge it in what you think is the right direction.
Perhaps. I’d be more tempeted to start a new documentation site and just do it all myself. At very least it needs a complete function reference. Would only take a couple of weeks.
Although that said I think a couple of weeks would be far better spent cleaning up some of the code. What I saw of it (and I think it was even recent stuff) was fucking terrible.