One of the problems that plague open source projects (and the WordPress plugin repository) is a lack of effective documentation. There are a lot of books about how to write good code, but there are precious few on how to write good documentation. Since documentation is a critical part of your plugin, we would be remiss if we neglected to give you some guidelines on how to write it effectively. Nothing is worse than pushing a good plugin on the public and not telling them what they need to know in order to use it. Think of it from a business standpoint: good user documentation means fewer client support requests and lower support costs.
The very first thing you need to do when writing documentation is identify the purpose of the given area that you are trying to document. The purpose in documenting a function, for example, is to educate the developer, whereas the purpose of the plugin's readme.txt
file is to educate the plugin user. The following are the three...