• I want to love Pods but their complete lack of documentation makes it utterly infuriating to work with. The fact that an option in your plugin can’t be found referenced in your documentation is ludicrous. Half the time there is “documentation” it ends up just being a blank page or contains content that lacks any context, like a random data table.

    For a plugin that has been around for years, this is completely unacceptable.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Plugin Author Scott Kingsley Clark

    (@sc0ttkclark)

    I thought I caught all of the doc pages that were empty a while back, I didn’t realize there were some still sitting published. We had originally revamped our docs a few years back and started laying out a framework for new pages but those were marked as published by mistake at the time.

    Which option were you looking for information on?

    Thread Starter nichcitarella

    (@nichcitarella)

    There was a lot but these are the ones that happened this afternoon.

    A majority of the Code Reference Pages are blank. The More Documentation at the bottom of the page should moved up to the body. Right now it reads as possibly related topics.

    Under Admin UI Style there is a Custom (hook into pods_admin_ui_custom or pods_admin_ui_custom_{podname} action) option. I can’t find to any reference to that.

    This is linked in multiple places but is broken, assuming it should redirect here .

    Plugin Support Paul Clark

    (@pdclark)

    Hi @nichcitarella ,

    While Scott is more qualified to improve any specific items on your mind, here are some concepts I’ve found helpful when working with the documentation and plugin as a whole:

    • At its core, Pods provides a graphical way to store extend the data structures of WordPress. It provides many convenience methods, such as dot notation for relationship traversal, magic tags for quick display of a field, and automatic joins when referring to content types in SQL queries.
    • This may seem frustrating at first glance, but also has a great advantage: because Pods uses core data structures, all documentation on developers.wordpress.org, PHP.net, and MySQL.com is applicable. These are languages with thousands of contributors and hundreds of pages of documentation. So at first glance, the documentation may seem sparse, but the core idea enabling many custom uses is that Pods is very minimalistic in creating “new” things where core tested functionality already exists. Everywhere a “Pods way” of doing things exists, core WordPress APIs such as WPDB, add_shortcode, WP_Query, taxonomy functions, user meta functions, and post meta functions also still work.
    • While one can refine searches of Pods docs by adding site:pods.io to a Google query, one can also search the GitHub repo for all filters and actions , and the WordPress database schema diagram can be a great reference for understanding which fields are available in what contexts. (The GitHub search link may be a great resource for the filter you mentioned, as these are often documented inline with code comments.)
    • Beyond that, the docs for the field(), display(), find(), and form() methods on the pods() object can all be useful, with the understanding that it’s all convenience methods for things available through core WordPress or the Pods shortcode .

    I know Scott has set documentation as a high priority for this release. I hope some of the above approaches might be helpful. We value your feedback on where documentation should be improved immensely, as it helps narrow down a scope of functionality which spans several languages which have developed over decades.

    Many WordPress plugins “rewrite the book”, creating entire environments incompatible with the “WordPress way”. By leveraging already existing languages and structures, Pods can be a very flexible way of working with systems that are still applicable even if Pods is not used.

    Plugin Author Scott Kingsley Clark

    (@sc0ttkclark)

    Those actions can be referenced here in GitHub where our codebase can be searched:

    https://github.com/pods-framework/pods/blob/a45cf6f3180d7537f104efce02629c6e5aae0643/classes/Pods.php#L4554 -L4555

    The actions themselves are useful if someone wants to completely roll their own UI. It gives you access to the current Pods object as documented here: https://docs.pods.io/code/pods/

    I’ll add this to my reminders to document for Advanced Content Types.

    I also fixed the links I saw that linked to the 404 there with the /comparisons/ related content.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)