Oh boy. I feel like a kid at Christmas. I’ve signed up to go to WordCamp Seattle, taking place next month. That’s because, of course, WordPress is the coolest thing ever. I think that every tech writer needs to know it. How I ever lived without it before now I can’t say. I could easily see it being used for docs. Toss some words up on the blog. Collect comments for said entries; engage the users. Tag items and automatically sort them into categories for archiving. Add pages and subpages and more. Import a Twitter feed or two. Dig away; use the Search box to sift through the content. Wow. What possibilities.
WordPress has tons of functionality. It’s open-source, and people are constantly developing plug-ins and themes that can be used by anybody. It’s collaboration on a grand scale.
Collaboration. That’s the future. That’s WordPress now.
Sit back and take a long look. Not just at WordPress itself, but at how it’s developed and maintained. See how everyone contributes themes and plug-ins. Start thinking of your docs as becoming open-source. What can you develop? What can we, as tech writers, do to make it easier for users to generate their own content, to join the conversation, to collaborate? It’s not enough to just think about and advocate for the user. We have to throw open the doors and let them in. We have to build the framework that allows the input.