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UPDATE: After 122 days in beta is is clear for all to see that WordPress Answers provides great content and many high-quality answers.

WordPress Answers on Area51

However, the pool of experts is far too small. This is born-out by the "Worrying" number of users and only "Okay" answer ratio.

Merging with other CMS proposals such as Drupal and Joomla will not only increase the number of experts but also provide a valuable tool for other CMS users.

ORIGINAL QUESTION:

Over the weekend I ran a little test, I submitted the same wordpress question to both wordpress.stackexchange.com and serverfault.com.

You can see the questions, here and here.

I would of expected the Wordpress comunity to jumped on my question over at wordpress.stackexchange.com but that didn't happen.

I can only conclude that as per Joel's blog post, WordPress should just be a tag in StackOverflow and ServerFault.

There is no point in duplicating efforts/questions/answers.

That said, CMS systems do span; system admin, programming and web design. I could see the possibility of a content management StackExchange. Hopefuly this will be created with a merge of WordPress, Drupal, CMS Development, Joomla etc.

Single CMS flavours are too narrow.

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  • No way, I got more answers from wordpress in one day of usage, than in over 6 months of stackoverflow. Instead we should only promote it on wordpress.org as a replacement for the forum there.
    – sorin
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 12:42
  • 2
    "we should only promote it on wordpress.org as a replacement for the forum there". I heartily disagree. Sure, we should promote it in general as THE BEST resource for WordPress answers, but only on wordpress.org? No thanks.
    – Travis Northcutt Mod
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 21:32
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    It shouldn't be shut down, but merging other CMS in it would be a better solution. It would increase the number a little and give some synergies. Each CMS by itself does not have the critical mass, but together the do, and it makes sense to have one place instead of three so that user, admin and programmers questions for CMS are in one place.
    – txwikinger
    Commented Sep 25, 2010 at 15:56
  • @txwikinger I totally agree, you should make your comment an answer.
    – Richard Stelling
    Commented Sep 25, 2010 at 22:46
  • I totally disagree. I want a place to ask and answer questions that is WordPress only. I dread the idea of having to wade through loads of totally off topic (for me) questions about dozens of other CMS's to get/give answers for the one I work with
    – Lemon Bacon
    Commented Oct 1, 2010 at 1:29
  • Just for the record, I used my questions as examples. It's a straw-man argument to focus on the relative appropriateness of these question. The real issues in the lack of users on Wordpress Answers.
    – Richard Stelling
    Commented Dec 13, 2010 at 9:57
  • I highly doubt that merging WPA with Drupal and Joomla would increase the number of experts available. These are three different systems, and most Drupal experts don't know any more about WP than WP experts know about Drupal. Merging the sites would just make it more difficult to find targeted, succinct, on-topic content.
    – EAMann Mod
    Commented Dec 14, 2010 at 16:06
  • @EAMann I'm sure the "wordpress", "drupal" and "joomla" tags will be more than adequate.
    – Richard Stelling
    Commented Dec 14, 2010 at 17:00
  • all three, wordpress, drupal and joomla have a larger time-frame on their back. While it's normally generally helpful to keep in mind what a web based CMS is, for those three programs you find a lot of different information. Especially for integrators (admins, coders, the folks we're looking for), there's always something to code. And that differs between each CMS a lot. So to find scope, a merge of everything CMS does not look valid to me from a standpoint of a "technician".
    – hakre
    Commented Dec 16, 2010 at 15:16

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NO

No, WordPress Answers should not be shut down. I've answered (at the time of this writing) 124 questions here (many of which were picked as best answer) and I will have absolutely no interest in participating in a merged site and at least a few others such as @Chris_O appear to feel the same.

Also, as for your "test" question, it was much more of a server question than a WordPress question and was thus (inadvertently?) disingenuous. Ask about Plugins or Custom Post Types here and I think you'll get very different results.

What's more, WordPress Answers has been in beta less than two (2) months; that's a blink of an eye. Give it a year to allow most WordPress users to discover it and then I think you'll see even better results. Asking to close this site is like judging Twitter's revenue in the first year. With that logic, Twitter would never have seen its worldwide success. Give it time.

-Mike

P.S. BTW, I'm curious, why is it important to you do see this site closed?

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  • I'm flabbergasted at the several suggestions I've seen so far saying that the site just isn't big enough to keep going. Do people genuinely not realize its only been around for two months?
    – Travis Northcutt Mod
    Commented Sep 29, 2010 at 13:24
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    Ditto and plus 1. I would avoid a multi CMS site like the plague. I need, want, demand even, a WordPress focussed place to ask and answer questions.
    – Lemon Bacon
    Commented Oct 1, 2010 at 1:33
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Your question was both server and WordPress related but more server related. Had you mentioned the memory limit issue here I am sure it would have been answered.

This SuperUser question has been asked at ServerFault and could probably be asked at Ubuntu with the networking tag. There is always going to be cross reference and some overlap between the StackExchange 2.0 sites.

WordPress has a much larger user base than any other CMS or web publishing platform.

There are over 25 million WordPress publishers as of June 2010: 11.4 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com plus 13.8 million active installations of the WordPress.org software. cite- http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

This site has a huge potential of users and will continue to grow and get better and should NOT be shut down.

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  • Just to clarify - I only discovered the memory problem once I had sorted the key issue.
    – Richard Stelling
    Commented Sep 20, 2010 at 23:01
  • I understand you won't know about the memory issue until the upgrade is attempted. It's a common upgrade problem. BTW I added your answer to your question here as well because it is very good information for WordPress developers and admins.
    – Chris_O
    Commented Sep 21, 2010 at 3:49
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I asked a similar question at the beginning of the beta: what is the scope of WordPress Answers, and how does it differ from the existing sites? Are there questions that we allow, but are not allowed on the other Stack Exchange sites?

I was hoping for more participation, but judging from the answers I think we will allow some questions about WordPress.com, which is now explicitly verboten on SuperUser. Also questions/recommendations about themes or plugins seem to be acceptable here, and probably not on other sites.

So currently I think WordPress Answers adds value to the Stack Exchange network, because it allows questions others do not. But if we want to keep the site grow, we should attract more experts. This requires more promotion, and better pruning of low-quality questions.

Also, I think it would take a while before they close a site Joel used as an example of the excellence of the Stack Exchange system!

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Hm...

So you had asked question about what seems like your server configuration issue (I don't see a thing it had to do with WP in solution) and wondering why 36000+ of server site came up with better half of an answer than <1000 users of PHP CMS site?..

Let's ask Server Fault about best code for functions.php and shutdown them for lackluster answers! :)

Re: Update

If you really want conglomerate CMS site - propose one at Area51?

PS we are so not bailing out Drupal or Joomla proposals, they are on their own :)

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