I don’t think there are too many people writing about WordPress for the reasons stated above. Most people who write about WP are writing about specific functionality, themes, plugins, or hacks, that they have used or have some kind of opinion on.

I started writing about WordPress because I was a huge fan and was impressed by all the helpful people in the community. In the WP world, I don’t consider my blog to be all that well known. I don’t create themes regularly, I don’t write plugins, I just write about the WP topics that matter to me and that I think may help others with WP as I have been helped by many of you above. However, the people that contact me to ask for help with WP related tasks consider me a WP expert. My WP expertise lies in teaching people what it is, how to apply it to the site they would like to build, and how to put the pieces together from existing themes, plugins, code hacks, etc.

I rely on the many people developing and writing about WP topics in order to help those that read my site and rely on me. I think we all have our place in the WP food chain, from the top, all the way down to the one sentence blog scapers (bottom feeders).

I think a WordPress portal built by the WordPress fanboys and fangirls is an idea that has merit, and I think would be a success, but I certainly wouldn’t want it to compete with any of the official WordPress resources, but rather be an extension of those resources.

I would jump at the opportunity to be involved and to put my specific WP expertise in a place where the highest number of current and future users could benefit.

Ryan, I think you’ll like this then: http://op111.net/71 :-)

At least Google seems to be doing a rather good job keeping the noise out of sight. And we can simply ignore the dozens of sites that just copy feature lists from the codex.

@Ryan – I agree. In fact, most times I don’t bother writing about anything that shows up in the dashboard because too many people will know about that information and anything else is just an echo. However, I think my recent post dealing with WordPress 2.8 and the release date is an example of something you are talking about where I added some more unique information to the post. In fact, I received a comment from someone when BuddyPress 1.0 was released that my post covering the event was a breath of fresh air because I wrote about it differently than most other people.

However, it’s pretty easy to succumb to the notion of spreading the news even if it’s published on a big publication. For example, while the WordPress Dev blog was the first to publish the info regarding the release of WordPress 2.8, I published the same information and a few people treated my post as if it’s the first time they heard about the news.

I don’t need to be alerted via 30 different blogs that WP 2.8 has been released. I’ll get that from the WordPress.org blog itself. However if you want to write a blog post talking ABOUT the new release, then that’s sweet as by me. Or even if you add a little snippet of info. about the release which wouldn’t have been in the 30 other blog posts which arrive in my feed reader I’d be happy with that too. But a single paragraph outlining the fact that WP 2.8 is released and a summarising the 30 other blog posts is simply annoying, particularly since they all arrive at the same time. All those posts do is to add to the noise IMO.

If they arranged some kind of site, portal, or newsletter and invited the top WP experts and bloggers to contribute in return for backlinks that would probably work. Maybe you “pay” your way in to get something published by contributing to the Codex documentation as well. All pie in the sky of course, hard to work out how it would get off the ground.

Any third party iniative would probably fail for most of the reasons people already listed. Its hard to launch such a site and keep good content coming in without monetization causing disputes, and if you do it purely for free people will not give it a high priority and it will just die from lack of content.

I’m in the “would love to get involved but don’t see how it would work” camp myself.

When it comes to learning how to develop plugins for WordPress I think most of the resources are not that good. The codex is a little confusing, its hard to find step-by-step tutorials beyond the basics. Often the blogs keep it at a very simple level at least for me. And most plugins are very badly written. (not that my newly released beta plugin is a masterpiece, will probably be refactored a little for next version)

Got some ideas on the teaching department also in my notes. Don’t know if there is much need for it though. From what I understand people find the admin menu hard and also the TinyMCE interface. Made some codegenerators for my personal C# and .Net stuff might do some similar stuff for WordPress.
Anyone that might be interested in codegeneration for wordpress and in that case what should be generated?

Andreas Nurbo’s last blog post..GWO plugin for WordPress: beta version released

@Justin Tadlock
I’m fairly certain that you and Matt were cut from the same cloth. :-)

If money is even an issue here (outside of paying for the site’s hosting), I’d be less inclined to do it. I’d rather something like this be a completely free resource for bloggers. This is what I was thinking it’d be, but the conversation seems to be all over the place here.