WordPress: “Too cool for documentation”

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.

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
  • Digg
  • Sphinn
  • Live
  • StumbleUpon

6 Comments | Leave a comment »

  1. 1. scott horne | June 29th 2007 @ 5:38 pm

    yeah wordpress documentation sucks donkey balls. I find myself having to dig through the source just about everytime I write something for wordpress.

  2. 2. Dax | June 29th 2007 @ 7:00 pm

    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.

  3. 3. Joost de Valk | June 29th 2007 @ 10:04 pm

    Haha Rob, been there done that too… Hate the documentation for widgets…

  4. 4. Patrick Altoft | June 29th 2007 @ 11:18 pm

    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.

  5. 5. Alastair McDermott | July 3rd 2007 @ 10:50 pm

    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.

  6. 6. Rob Haswell | July 4th 2007 @ 9:53 am

    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.

Leave a Reply

required

required, hidden

one.com
smx

Start with £50 credit in your new Yahoo! Search Marketing account for a limited period only.

+ Advertise Here