WordPress Community
Ya know? The WordPress community — all the volunteers, theme and plugin developers and folks who just want to help — are some great folks. I hang out at the WP Support forums frequently. Folks there were very helpful to me when I was learning this thing and, as a result, I try to “give a little back” and answer questions where I can (although I keep waiting for a moderator to tell me to go away, I’m hoping I provide some value). I’m even pondering building my own little “WordPress FAQ” type page just to give me a handy place to store links. The search is pretty borked there and a lot of folks aren’t comfortable with using “site:wordpress.org/support” type searching at their search engine of choice so the similar questions come up frequently.
(brings up a minor rant: I wish the folks that own/manage/run the wordpress.org site would give it a bit of attention. Stuff has been broken there for quite some time now and it grows a bit, shall we say, tedious working around it)
I’ve exchanged emails with several theme and plugin developers and found them to be very helpful and responsive. In fact, last night I was chatting with the developer of the Sitemap Generator plugin that I’m using. Super nice guy (assuming guy, but maybe gal? Like I care) and we spent several hours debugging and hacking at it to entice into doing something it wasn’t really intended to do — plop a sitemap directly on my 404 error page. We ended up with a bit of a work-around that works for now. I bet we dinked around on it for at least 2 hours via IM. It was after midnight before we called it good enough (and I have no clue what timezone they are in!).
This afternoon I received an email indicating that there’s good news and some changes in the works. How cool is that? I’ve had similar experiences with a few other folks just like that.
Another example of a flexible plugin author can be found in this older thread (scroll down a bit to the Notable section). Again, he went the extra mile to come up with something that we were both happy with. Now, as I write this, I’m not currently using his plugin, but I will have it going again. Was busy “simplifying” my theme pages a bit today to make sure I had a handle on how it all works…
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Flair and Sparklies
Don’t expect to be run off any time soon
There can never be enough volunteers, be it in the forum or in the codex.
And I think we all are looking forward to wordpress.org getting some more love.
[...] In general, I’m a big fan of WordPress. As mentioned before, I even spend a lot of time haunting the support forums. All that aside, I have the damndest little bug that’s just driving me nuts. Not a major bug. Not a show-stopper even. In fact, it really doesn’t impact me at all. But it bugs me just knowing that it happens… [...]