[wp-hackers] Developer portal

[Matt Mullenweg]

On 2009-12-14 2:48 PM, Nathan Rice wrote:
> Not that it would matter if there were attribution. If a person writes good
> WordPress tutorials, but they do it all at WordPress.org, then what does it
> benefit them to have a link back to their blog?

It's true that when you contribute to WP it does require some 
sublimation of the ego. This is why you don't see developer names 
plastered all over the source code of core WP even when a class or 
function is largely the function of a single author. (In the beginning.)

The problem with offsite resources besides the sites change, shift, 
expire, redirect to porn, is that more fundamentally it's the product of 
a single person.

Much like canonical plugins, we want people to work together to create 
something better than they would be able to create on their own. (Just 
like WordPress works.) Our own Mark/Podz used to have fantastic 
tutorials on his site, but then he started to get overwhelmed with 
people contacting him for support because they were on his site, and 
then they got out of date and no one else updated them because they were 
"Mark's tutorials."

My favorite kind of attribution is collective, "we built this together." 
That's basically what we have on the wp.org about page now (though it's 
woefully incomplete), and what we've talked about for an easter egg 
credits page in WP core.

I fully expect there to be fantastic stuff posted on other sites just 
like there is today, just because we have some 
resources/tutorials/documentation on the official site doesn't mean the 
other stuff goes away.

-- 
Matt Mullenweg
http://ma.tt | http://wordpress.org | http://automattic.com