Too Much Noise

The WordPress community bugs me sometimes. I don't really have anything bad to say about the community personally. Just the side-effects of the community, which I can sum up in one word.

NOISE.

There are tens-of-thousands of people posting blog posts about the same exact thing. For example, recently I needed to write a plugin that would display the results of a search on a page in the content area. I looked it up on google and found thousands of articles on "How to write a wordpress plugin". Each one describing in nearly the EXACT same words how to accomplish the very first step in writing a widget (and only a widget... certainly no-one would want to write something ELSE!) Nothing more. I was only able to get some success after reading the source code of about 15 other plugins.

While working on a different wordpress site, I was looking for some ways to save time and use a plugin I was SURE someone had made (something that could rename page titles in the menu). But again there are tens-of-thousands of people posting articles on "The top 10 plugins to save you time" and "The 20 plugins every wordpress developer should know about!" Maybe I'm being a little nieve that there are actually people who would be stupid enough to title ther articles that way and actually have USEFUL content. Silly me.

Before I accumulate too many haters though I should validate that WordPress is a good system. I like it. In fact, it seems to be the BEST platform for SEO related functionality and it fits the blog role very well. The themes are funky but there are a lot of options out there and the plugin library is vast, if misleading.

Do the community a favor next time you post an article about your favorite tool. Ask yourself this question "Is this article helpful or am I just adding to the noise?"