Documentation

As I investigate plug-ins I find that the WP community seems to have a mentality of “here’s my gem, see if you can figure it out, I can’t be bothered to tell you.” I once interviewed an engineer by asking him to describe on the board something he had designed. He drew a circuit diagram. I asked him “what does it do?” He spent 20 minutes describing the details of the circuit but never once could he tell me in simple language what use the whole thing was to anyone.

I get the same feeling in reading plug-in descriptions. Fortunately many of the plug-ins are simple enough and I can figure out if they are useful by trial and error, but why can’t people give a description of what it does with some examples for people who didn’t write the thing?

I find most of the screen shots useless in providing useful examples of the plugins. Usually they are too miniscule to read and don’t accurately reflect a good example.

I’m sure there are many good descriptions, but I run across very few of them. If you are going to contribute to the rest of the world, please take the time to really show off your work and save the rest of us a lot of trial and error.