Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
V
in the future by guiding you to the answers that are out there and by helping you avoid wasting
time looking for answers that probably aren't easily found.
WordPress.com Documentation
Strictly speaking, there is no official WordPress.com documentation.
All Automattic offers is a guide to the existing documentation for WordPress—that is, for
WordPress.org—with pointers to the parts that are most likely to be helpful to WordPress.com
users.
The trouble is, the WordPress.org software has additional screens and additional fields on screens
that are shared between the two. The WordPress.com user will find little depth on the relatively
simple topics—simple, that is, to most WordPress.org users—that he or she is likely to worry
about. At the same time, there's a lot of extraneous stuff that the WordPress.com user doesn't
even need to know about.
It's a bit like exploring the moon by starting with a map of the universe, then crossing off all the
parts that aren't the moon. In the official WordPress documentation, there isn't actually a map of
just the moon.
This topic attempts to improve on the situation by providing WordPress.com-specific information
along the way. However, there's still a lack of specific information for the WordPress.com user. If
you are using WordPress.com, you'll have to learn to wear blinders and ignore WordPress.org stuff
that doesn't apply to you while you find the information and support you need for WordPress.com.
The WordPress Codex
The WordPress Codex is the first place to look for information about using WordPress. It's the clos-
est thing to official documentation that WordPress has. Visit the WordPress Codex at http://codex.
wordpress.org, as shown in Figure B.1.
Many people use the Codex, though, without realizing it's a wiki. A what, you might say? A
wiki
is
an online storage capability for articles from a variety of people. Posting to a wiki is usually pretty
much unrestricted, and editing is done by volunteers. The results can be pretty good, especially for
broad, complicated topics with fast-changing information.
The best-known wiki is, of course, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that takes as its subject, well,
everything. Tellingly, Wikipedia has recently had to tighten up its procedures after some people
posted opinions as if they were facts. The WordPress Codex still allows absolutely anyone to add to
or edit most of the pages in it.
The WordPress community is very strong and does a good job of maintaining the WordPress Codex.
However, to have a wiki as the gold standard of a product's documentation, rather than as a sup-
portive element to a professionally written and maintained core, is a bit unnerving.
There actually is an official WordPress document, the WordPress User Handbook. It's worth reading
to get a coherent view of WordPress.org—not WordPress.com, sorry—straight from the horse's
mouth, so to speak. The Handbook can suffer from versionitis; at this writing, the Handbook is one
release behind the current version of the software, making it out of date in parts. Visit the
WordPress User Handbook, as shown in Figure B.2, at http://wordpress.org/docs.
