I mentioned before that the jQuery project was going to switch from Mediawiki to using WordPress for their online documentation. They’ve recently pulled the trigger on that change, and you can now visit the new WordPress-powered site at: api.jquery.com
Performance and Backend
As mentioned before, we’ve switched away from using a MediaWiki backend to a new WordPress-powered backend. So far we’ve been very impressed with the performance. Every single page on the site is heavily cached and gzipped – with all media being served up from our CDN. We think you’ll find it to be a significant performance improvement over the old docs site.
This seems to be an excellent example of a site using WordPress as a CMS. Each API method is created as a post, and they use categories liberally to make it easier for users to locate the methods they need based on usage. There’s also a nice AJAX live-search that narrows down results as you type. Obviously, they are using a custom tailored theme, and a permalink structure that produces easy to remember bookmarks like “api.jquery.com/slideDown/“. As an added bonus, they get user comments and an easier way to manage spam. Nice!
I imagine that there is more going on behind the scenes to help them manage the documentation structure of each API method, code examples, and demonstrations. Maybe some day we can coax them into giving us some more details about that.
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5 Comments
VERY interesting!!
I wonder how they implemented that AJAX Search.
The most wanted advantage of MediaWiki over Wordpress IMHO is it allowing anybody to contribute on the wiki. In fact, when I worked on it as admin, I was deeply upset with its lack of user management, there was no way to control access permissions on it! My feeling was that it was developed to be a community-based system, so they didn’t mind controlling what users could do and creating rules and many permissions.
Now with Wordpress they can’t have the community contributing directly on documentation, only throu comments, but it seems they already have a great doc, so maybe that’s not needed at all.
First thing I felt when I saw it is that the site is well organized and it is easy to find what we want. Probably I won’t need Google when I learn jQuery and need to run to docs.
They should really share how they developed the site, more APIs docs would be improved using a similar approach.
I bet you 10 to 1 that WordPress.org picks this up from the jQuery team does the same thing for the Codex. I think this would be very usefull. Then we can kill Mediawiki as well since Mediawiki is over bloated.
Nice Job jQuery Team!
I said that very same thing on Twitter a while back, it’s something I’d like to see WordPress.org doing too, at the very least it’ll let new (and existing) members of the community actually see what WordPress can do and that it’s more then just a bit of blogging software!
… What I’m saying is it’d be a smart move!
That would be very cool. A seriously massive migration though.
Hopefully they’ll also keep the wiki style community edits. Fortunately, “there’s a plugin for that”.
jquery and wordpress are good couple
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