Hi @nichcitarella,
While Scott is more qualified to improve any specific items on your mind, here are some concepts I’ve found helpful when working with the documentation and plugin as a whole:
- At its core, Pods provides a graphical way to store extend the data structures of WordPress. It provides many convenience methods, such as dot notation for relationship traversal, magic tags for quick display of a field, and automatic joins when referring to content types in SQL queries.
- This may seem frustrating at first glance, but also has a great advantage: because Pods uses core data structures, all documentation on developers.www.ads-software.com, PHP.net, and MySQL.com is applicable. These are languages with thousands of contributors and hundreds of pages of documentation. So at first glance, the documentation may seem sparse, but the core idea enabling many custom uses is that Pods is very minimalistic in creating “new” things where core tested functionality already exists. Everywhere a “Pods way” of doing things exists, core WordPress APIs such as WPDB, add_shortcode, WP_Query, taxonomy functions, user meta functions, and post meta functions also still work.
- While one can refine searches of Pods docs by adding site:pods.io to a Google query, one can also search the GitHub repo for all filters and actions, and the WordPress database schema diagram can be a great reference for understanding which fields are available in what contexts. (The GitHub search link may be a great resource for the filter you mentioned, as these are often documented inline with code comments.)
- Beyond that, the docs for the field(), display(), find(), and form() methods on the pods() object can all be useful, with the understanding that it’s all convenience methods for things available through core WordPress or the Pods shortcode.
I know Scott has set documentation as a high priority for this release. I hope some of the above approaches might be helpful. We value your feedback on where documentation should be improved immensely, as it helps narrow down a scope of functionality which spans several languages which have developed over decades.
Many WordPress plugins “rewrite the book”, creating entire environments incompatible with the “WordPress way”. By leveraging already existing languages and structures, Pods can be a very flexible way of working with systems that are still applicable even if Pods is not used.
