WordPress has great documentation!
May 16th, 2006
About a year ago I was researching the major open source blogging engines. The top 2 at the time were TextPattern and WordPress. I read many a review on both, and finally decided to go with TextPattern because as far as I could tell in reading the reviews it had more customization options.
Well a year later, and here I am with a new site and a new blogging engine. This website you are reading right now is managed by the WordPress engine. And for what it’s worth, WordPress RULES! Just some really really smart development by the WP team, and by far some of the best software documentation I have ever seen. It is well organized, lots of references, lots of examples and sample code. Just about any question you could have about the platform is answered in the docs. I imagine that must help keep the tech support queries to a minimum. Well, that is if people actually took the time to look for the answers in the docs.
My new found interest in WordPress was sparked by a new task at my job with BLITZ in which I was asked to research WordPress theme creation and templates. You see we have a company blog that covers the more technical aspects of what we do, and in the near future we will be launching a new homepage design. Along with the new design of the website we will be fully integrating the blog to be a more integral part of the website, and allow us to show not only the technical aspect of what we do, but also show a bit more about the personalities of the great minds that make up the BLITZ team.
The install of WordPress took less than 30 minutes. Why? Great documentation.
The setup of WordPress took less than 30 minutes. Why? Great user interface.
The building of a fully customized them took about 5 hours (not including design). Why? Because of great documentation.
OK, I know this is probably a bit boring, but the truth is I needed some actual content to test out this new theme, and so I figure what better way to kick off this blog than with a rave of the WordPress documentation.
Note: I will be adding comment functionality to the blog shortly, but wanted to get something up and running as quick as possible. It’s as the brilliant folks as 37 Signals say “release early and release often.”
