I’m working on a plugin that adds some much-needed (IMHO) logging capabilities to WordPress 2.1 blogs. As such, I’m making heavy use of hooks and filters, and looking into the possibility of leveraging into the new pseudo-cron functionality in 2.1 to do scheduled exports of system logs.

Unfortunately, I’m rapidly finding that despite being an excellent piece of software, WordPress is greatly lacking in developer-centric documentation, especially for the new features introduced in 2.1. There is virtually no documentation on pseudo-cron, and the code inline documentation is also painfully sparse. The same goes for the nonce functionality, introduced in 2.0.3, for which I can only find one tutorial on the web detailing its usage, and no official documentation.

Looking at the official release announcement from Matt Mullenweg, he lists a number of reasons for developers to upgrade to 2.1:

• Psuedo-cron functionality let’s you schedule events much like cron.
• Users admin can now comfortably handle hundreds of thousands of users.
• The new WP_Error class cleans up how we do error reporting and handling.
• The javascript loader makes it easier for plugins to include rich functionality.
• Tons of new hooks and APIs.
• We’ve started to fill out our code inline documentation.
• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins.
• Custom header, color picker, and image cropping framework.

Those are all great reasons for WordPress plugin developers to start developing for the 2.1+ branch of WordPress releases. Without adequate documentation, however, it’s really difficult for us to really get into all these things. There’s only so much we can glean from looking at the code.

Yes, I’m aware that it is an open source project, with a documentation wiki. I’m certainly prepared to have to go in and add some documentation myself, as I slowly learn how to use each feature. Matt and the Automattic team have done an incredible job on developing WordPress, not just as a piece of software but as a community and service, and I’m not trying to downplay the value of their work, but the basic documentation should be up there and should be considered an essential part of each major point release. The core developers should be the ones filling out the info for stuff like the plugin API, instead of relying on the plugin developers to go hunting for new actions and filters. I hope the team and the community can get the Codex up to speed quickly in order to make WordPress plugin development as painless as possible. The easier it is for us to deliver the extra features that users want, as plugins, the more the users benefit.