Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
B
WORDPRESS DOCUMENTATION
Finding Your Way Through the
Online Documents
It's fair to say that WordPress is fairly well documented and supported.
It's also fair to say that WordPress is not very well documented and
supported.
Huh? Right about now, you might be thinking of the old saying that you
can't have it both ways.
Let's start with the optimistic view. For an open source project,
WordPress is quite well documented. (Many open source projects lack
any end-user documentation at all.) Support is also good, in a sense—
there is some!
The pessimistic view is that even expert WordPress users complain
about how long it can take to find information or get an answer. For
those of us who aren't experts, and bring with us our expectations from
working with commercial products, or in a workplace with decent IT
support, WordPress documentation and support can look sparse indeed.
And for those of us who like printed manuals, there's nothing; it's all
online. This does have the advantages of easy searchability and easy
updating. But online documentation usually lacks the coherence, consis-
tency, and high standards of editing of a good, printed document.
Anyone in their right mind wants both, so each can support the other;
but the official WordPress documentation is online only.
We invite you to spend a few minutes here to learn about the core
WordPress documentation elements and what each of them does and
doesn't do. This small investment of time now will save you many hours
