Earlier this week, I wrote about the challenges of documenting WordPress projects regardless of if they are free or premium.

In the post, I mentioned that another challenge that comes with actually documenting a project is making sure that you’re catering to the various ways that people learn.

First, as a general rule, I think that projects should include:

• Source Code Documentation. Free projects should have code comments, premium projects should have code comments, PHPDoc (or similar) style documentation, and API documentation if one is available.
• A Manual. Free projects should have a README and potentially a web page, premium projets should have a manual that’s perhaps its own website complete with screenshots and/or videos.

But this raises a second question about WordPress documentation, specifically around premium projects: If people have different styles of learning, that is, some learn better by reading, others better by watching, are we obligated to provide both forms of documentation?

Continue reading

If you spend time maintaining a WordPress project – be it a theme, plugin, or application, and regardless of if it’s free or premium – then you know the challenges that come with writing and maintaining documentation for your project.

Sure, I think many of us who build and maintain projects consider documentation a form of support, but when you ask a customer to define support, you’re more likely to hear about their ability to communicate with someone through a forum or a phone call (depending on your service).

I mean, case in point, when I think about support for my cellular service, I don’t think of documentation of Sprint’s network. I think of talking to a person.

Anyway, all that to say is that over the past few years of working with various types of projects – both on my own and with my team – the trend seems to be that documentation for free projects is expected, but ignored, whereas documentation for premium projects is not only expected, but also read.

But I write this to ask if this is something the rest of you guys have noticed, and, if so, if there isn’t something that can be done to improve this particular situation or it’s simply the nature of the economy. Continue reading

For the past few weeks, I’ve been talking about the decision to migrate away from the WordPress Plugins Repository and move back to the premium model similar to what I once offered. The truth is, this is going to introduce a bit of WordPress fragmentation which may not be a good thing.

If you’re just catching up on this, here are a few articles about the migration:

• Open Source Ethics: Profiting From Contributions
• My Problems with the WordPress Plugins Repository
• Finding The Right WordPress Support System

I’ve enjoyed the discussion around all of this, but there’s one problem that is introduced when developers opt to move away from the central WordPress repository.

It introduces fragmentation into the market.

Continue reading