While browsing for specific plugins today on WordPress.org, I noticed a link at the top of the site that took me to a short survey where the answers will be used to improve the WordPress.org website. Please consider taking part in this survey as the WordPress.org website is one of the weakest links of the project. My opinion of the site and the islands around it is that it’s all one giant messy room that I have to wade through to find what I’m looking for. Hopefully, the responses in this survey give the team the necessary info to completely restructure the content on the website to make it easier to find. The last question in the survey asked me, Do you have any suggestions for how we can make the WordPress.org site better/more useful? My answer is blockquoted below.
Personally, I think the biggest weakness of the current website is the lack of organization of the data that it presents to the public. There is a lot of good information strewn about multiple pages but it takes too many clicks to get to. Also, some information needs be brought out from the depths of the site and made more public facing.
Placing the WordPress software aside, the WordPress.org website is one of the cornerstones of the project that I feel needs to be an awesome public face for the project.
I made some pointed commentary on the Survey, myself. The opportunity to write actual comments in the survey is so valuable, and so dominant a feature of the form, that I suspect that the ‘survey’ is just an excuse to let folks really ‘sound off’.
It’s hard to get experts to freely share what they often struggled hard and otherwise “paid” to gain for themselves. Why should they give it away? ‘Documentation’ is such an atrocious problem in Open Source, for partly this reason. Experts ‘pretend’ to offer the goods (in some cases, without realizing it).
Having watched WordPress since before the wider CMS community thought is was anything to worry about, I do think the ‘issues’ with WP-support are a bit on the ‘nit-pick’ side … tho Jeffro’s lament (and others) is valid. After all, the stuff is there, which is more than can be generally expected! … albeit a jungle.
More fundamental, the topical range is large, complex, and changing. We want lots of choices, but then we are burdened by choices. We want an improved product, but then everything is new (or outdated).
Not that Dot Org can’t be improved. It has, through several major iterations, and will (have to) going forward.