I’m a huge WordPress fan. If I’m building a website it’s usually the first thing that I stick on the webspace, the power of the CMS features in WordPress’ means that it’s my programming choice.
However, despite all it’s brilliance, it does have one fault, the WordPress Official Support forum is terrible. Questions get unanswered, and moderators work behind the scenes, so even if there is a problem, you’re not sure where to go.
I’m not the first to notice this – Devon Dudgeon in a guest post on Robert Bravery’s Blog said the following:-
“This is probably the most popular blogging service but without technical help it can cause a few tears (or was that just me?). “
There are places to look though. Here’s three places I look.
Sitepoint Forums
I’m a huge fan of the Sitepoint Forums, although they’re not specifically about WordPress, they do have great CSS & PHP forums. There is also a WordPress subforum which is far more useful than the parent “Blogging” forum, who’s posts are all “how to make money blogging?”. It’s not great for plugin support, or more specialised WordPress help, but for general PHP & CSS help, it’s great.
WordPress Tavern
One forum that pops up time & again for specialist queries is WordPress Tavern, which seems to be a community of developers with in depth knowledge of WordPress. Seems to me that the discussions are a lot more specialised than both on the Sitepoint forums & the official forums.
Paid Support
Other than that, there are plenty of places to go to for paid support. There’s sites such as Odesk & elance for freelancers, as well as the WordPress Pro Mailing List. I’ve never used these though.
These are the solutions I use, how about you? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Tags: forums, help, wordpress | Comments: 6 Comments
Rhys Wynne, the author of this blog, is a 20 something web designer from Colwyn Bay. 
I’m working on it! Really!
Thanks for the list – I’ll refer back to it next time I work with WP.
Another place that is currently needing people to commit to it is WordPress Answers, which is built on the Stack Exchange framework: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1500/wordpress-answers?referrer=xMqXpwgZnLUN5QfMOt5KEg2
I thought otto was one of the WP mods? Damn, it must be worse than I thought if a mod is setting up his own alternative WP help forum…
http://www.wptavern.com/forum/ has saved my bacon more than a few times when I’ve had a technical problem with a bit of plugin code.
Generally though, I keep bashing my head against a wall until either my brains or a solution comes out.
http://www.Bytesforall.com has a very helpful wp forum with its main focus on the Atahualpa theme. Altahualpa is my favorite quickly-customized WP theme. Its features are robust and most importantly their forum is always helpful.