[wp-hackers] Where Can I Ask These Questions?

[Mark Jaquith]

> hackers and plugin authors can ask questions to help them better  
> understand what is going on in the WP bowels. I for one would  
> welcome a list or forum where expertise is available as I find many  
> questions I ask on the support forum go completely unanswered due,  
> I understand, to a lack of knowledge.

As long as you exercise due diligence in searching the forums, codex  
and Google for the answer, and assuming it isn't something that  
someone with a modicum of PHP knowledge could discover by looking at  
the code, I have no problem with it coming up here.  Perhaps you  
could even take the answers you get to the Docs mailing list where  
you discuss how best to put that information into the Codex.

On Dec 15, 2006, at 7:50 AM, Andy Staines wrote:

> Why did this suddenly get created?

This is the series of regular expressions and matches used by WP's  
internal rewrite engine (compressed into a serialized array).  Think  
of it as mod_rewrite implemented in PHP (for greater compatibility  
and perfect compatibility between people using mod_rewrite to pipe  
everything through WP and people using the /index.php/ or 404 tricks  
to pipe things to WP).

> What were the circumstances that caused it to get created?

Creating a permalink structure in Options > Permalinks (WP 2.0 or later)

> Is it actually required?

If you have a permalink structure, yes.

> Does it matter that it appears to be truncated mid-word?

That sounds strange, could you pastebin it?

> Whilst I would still welcome answers to the above, my question here  
> is where should I actually be asking this? Hackers? Testers?  
> Anywhere else I donlt know about?

As I said, I have no problem with this particular question on wp- 
hackers, because (1) you exhausted all other avenues (2) it's not a  
dumb question that could be answered with 5 minutes and basic PHP  
knowledge.

Here's something I'm throwing out there.  What about if the mods in  
the WP.org support forums were given a way of marking a thread as  
"expert" ?  As needing the advice of an expert.  If it's something  
they've never seen, and something that Google and the Codex know  
nothing about, they could tag it as needing an expert opinion.   
People like me could subscribe to that tag in their RSS reader.  As  
long as it was only a few questions a week and as long as it  
adequately filtered lazy or repeat questions, I'd be happy to chime  
in with answers when I have them.  The problem with the forums the  
signal to noise ratio is too low for people with expert knowledge.

--
Mark Jaquith
http://markjaquith.com/

Covered Web Services
http://covered.be/