Welcome to Smuggle Me

I’m currently sitting in the Las Vegas Wordcamp listening to Matt Mullenweg’s talk on “The State of the Word.” He just announced that WordPress will be launching a WordPress handbook.

The basic concept is that WordPress will be taking a subset of the Codex and some information done from scratch to document the releases of WordPress. This Handbook will be put into subversion and when a new release of WordPress is release, the handbook can be trunked out and be fixed similar to how the code for WordPress is done. Users can submit fixes to the WordPress Handbook and some users will have the ability to commit the changes.

This seems like a really cool idea since it will allow the Handbook to be version specific. It will also make it much easier for the international community to know what to translate (since translating the ever changing Codex is very difficult).

Of course, the first question is how will this work with the Codex. The answer is that the Codex will remain because it has just too much good information. However, Matt said that it’s so new that we’ll have to just see how they work together and which parts will remain in the Codex and which will be moved to the Handbook.

The other important point is that Matt said the document would be saved in a special format (I didn’t catch the exact format) that will allow it to be viewed in multiple formats including: pdf’s, windows help files, etc. Plus, this format allows consultants, plugin creators, etc to be able to integrate their own help files into the main WordPress Handbook. Pretty cool. Sounds like a simple way to create a WordPress for Dummies book.

Matt said that the first version of the WordPress Handbook will be released later this week.

Thanks to Izea for sponsoring my attendance at WordCamp Las Vegas