Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

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.

via Pre Release Day 1 – The 14 Days of jQuery.

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.