A site with WordPress tutorials, tips, and stuff from the pros

[greenshady]

I've been thinking of starting a site for a while that brought together as many WordPress pros as possible. It would be a blog that focused on tips, tricks, and tutorials for anything *Press related.

I know people have toyed around with this idea, but I haven't really seen it done.

It'd be a place where we build a community of people working together to spread the WP knowledge.

Focus:

Anything and everything WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress, and so on. This could range from quick tips to full-blown tutorials.

Who:

I'd love to get some more experienced and well-known developers and designers to write some articles. But, this could also be a place for up-and-coming WP community members to get their name out.

Compensation:

Since people don't like to work for free, my plan would be to allow the writers to post their own ads (if they wanted) along with their article. For example, if I wrote an article, I could advertise Theme Hybrid on the article's page. I'm also open to other ideas.

Interested?

I thought I'd just throw the idea out there and see if there's any interest in this. I probably wouldn't start the site without 10+ writers.

This isn't something that's set in stone yet. I'd just like to hear from you all.

[Rarst]

Current issues with WordPress materials online (as for me):

• crazy extensive code base, very few people are completely acquainted with;
• shortage of good native documentation;
• shifting target - things change, upgrade, get deprecated hence last year cutting edge code can be obsolete and harmful today.

It's not hard to put together WP resource (zillion of them already). It is crazy hard to keep its content maintained and out of that zillion no one really bothers.

So if I wanted professional-level resource I'd expect following features:

• strict and up to date function/object/hook reference - from reading code readers must be able to understand how it works and why this exact way was chosen (there are ten ways to do anything and about eight of them are wrong with WP);
• structure by topic instead fluff of the day, if I am working on comments area I need easy way to reach materials on comments area instead of praying for Google to come up with something;
• maintaining of old materials, they must be clearly timestamped, WP-versioned and periodically weeded and re-coded if needed;

Overall I don't think it will work in blog format at all. Such features are closer to documentation, than to chronological articles.

We could use WordPress wiki or KB for a change. :)

[Leland]

It's a nice idea, but it's hard to imagine something like this gaining traction when a lot of the big name developers in the community have their own things going on.

With that said, I know I'd love to read (and maybe even contribute) to a centralized WordPress article/tutorial site.

[andreasnrb]

I think it would require lots of time and effort to do something like that. I don't think ads would work by themselves. A bunch of people coming together in a joint venture deal and not everything on the site being free would probably get more support.

Also I don't think the blog format is suited for that. I got some ideas on how I would like it to work though. Been looking into the best way to present tutorials and docs for my own plugins.
One thing I know for sure is that I don't like how the WordPress codex works .

[andrea_r]

On the up side, a site with some of the top minds of WP collaborating on tutorials or whatever, could be a really really awesome site.

There's a lot of ifs though. :)

IF you could get the big names to go for it.
IF you had a winning format.
IF you can keep it going after initial launch.

[andreasnrb]

Don't forgot they would have to be able to write also. On an level that people understand.
Not everyone can write good tutorials or articles. I doubt just because you are a name in the biz you are a good technical information writer.

[Rarst]

By the way, another issue I thought about is license for code in tutorials posted online and such. For WP it can easily be extensive and include good chunk of WP functions (which is exactly what considered to GPL-poison themes).

In practice blogs don't really bother defining license for tutorials. That means code is "all rights reserved" or at best "creative commons" with latter being easier to use, but a mess.

In practice those snippets morph and fly around freely. Usually with attribution but even that can be easily misguided. I had been credited more than once for snippets that I only adapted and polished from code by Joost de Valk.

So if talking about major professional site on WP - it won't be able to reuse much of existing knowledge without going extra mile and asking about each snippet and such. It also must be highly GPL-compatible so information can be freely used for development without potential issues down the road.

[hafiz]

If small names are invited to contribute then I'm in :)

[Cais]

I like the idea, especially since I have been thinking about it myself for a little while ...

I think some of the keys would be: finding the right format; content writers to contribute on a fairly regular basis; a few marquee names to get the ball rolling; keeping it current; and, marketing the site correctly to insure traffic.

I think the compensation model, if one is going to be used, will be the most difficult to fairly sort out.

[film_girl]

I think it's a good idea, and I think it's a resource that is sorely needed, but I'll echo Rarst's thoughts in his two posts, most especially with regards to keeping back content updated.

I wonder if the better solution wouldn't be to try to add information and updates to the Codex (as much as the Codex might suck in terms of adding info and whatnot -- and to be clear, I don't know its process, I just know people bitch about it), seeing as it is an official resource.

I mean, ultimately, while having an experts-generated tutorial site would be awesome -- if your goal is to also provide any sort of documentation or examples, it makes the most sense to add that stuff to the official channels.

That said -- an aggregated link of expert sources (from say a specific RSS feed on said experts site) would certainly be a nice addition to the overall community.

As far as payment goes -- unless you can deliver amazing traffic (and also traffic that will wind up with referrals), honestly, I don't know how many people will want to work for free. But you never know!