Documentation, seriously

I see alot of potential in opencart because it's extremely easy to understand the interface. HOW EVER. The lack of documentation in modules and files is horrible. Not a single relevant line of documentation or guideline. I've been developing modules for drupal and wordpress and EVERYONE is commenting their own code.

This is a big issue for the future of opencart. Who will be able to create modules when the only way to create is by guessing to a solution? No wiki, no api. Come on. I've spent over 6 hours adding fields. And I'm not done yet. Because it's a maze of code that has no explanation to it what so ever.

Should'nt it be a standard to have som kind of documentation?

Everybody complains about it, no one contributes any documentation.

You have found out yourself, why not write one?

I think the main two that are improving and creating for Opencart and who developed it are probably too busy with that to write up documentation. I think they do an incredible job as it is keeping up with requests and helping out in the forums. This shopping cart IS open source meaning anyone can contribute and it is most APPRECIATED by everyone. Especially those of us that are just starting into creating our stores online and are struggling to grasp how all this works.

Sooooo, if you wrote up a little article explaining what you were trying to do and how you did it so us begginers could learn from it, they will definetly add it to the documentation and we would SO admire you!

There are definitely a lot of helpful explanations however the ones that are helpful to beginners are scattered in amongst the posts in the forum. Unfortunately even though the search functionality has improved greatly using the Google Search it unfortunately provides too many results that are not in descending date order, leaving it open for people to edit based on a much older version of OC.

Perhaps these could be collated and put into a wiki or some such document in a logical order (yes I know that would be a big job for somebody).

I agree wholeheartedly with regard to commenting the code, not only in the core but certainly in modules that replace files in the core. With a totally dynamic linking (none of the hardcoded urls) ideally modules would be self supporting without a need to mess about with core files. Carts and other applications I have used along the way, with commented code, have made it a dream to learn and understand and eliminated messing up the install.

Just my 2c worth.

I will today explain exactly how I made it work if I get done.

It's been shown that 95% of people don't read the little bit of documentation that we do have... so that doesn't motivate us to write more. First we need forum etiquette and phonetic reading classes to be taught.... then the documentation will flow

From this post it sounds like development documentation might be a good next step, we will look at adding some to our doco in the near future =)