Pods is a pet project that I've been working on for more than a year. It's purpose is to sit on top of WordPress and allow for users to create custom data structures, called content types. It's sort of like Drupal CCK, but for WordPress.

The biggest challenge for the Pods team isn't what most developers would expect. It's not the coding itself, the bug tracking, or the release testing. The toughest aspect for us is balancing coding and documentation. We're not proud of our documentation yet, but we're finally aware of how important it is for our project (or any project) to suceeed.

There are many great open source projects out there. A lot of great projects also fail. Why? It's not necessarily because their code is obsolete, or because there are better ways of doing things than their project code allows. Most of the time, projects fail simply because people don't know how to use it. The software itself isn't intuitive enough, the documentation sucks, or both. Your potential users move on, and your software gets left behind. The WordPress team didn't succeed only because the software itself is easy to use (although it didn't hurt). WordPress succeeded because when you can't figure something out, the well-written documentation and tutorials are there to guide you in the right direction. It's only after your users start reaching "Ah-ha!" moments that your community can really start to flourish. In the spirit of documenting how Pods works, here's the first of (hopefully) many tutorial videos. Enjoy.