This is not a rant. It’s a post from a fan who is sad, very sad.
I am a fan of Redux Framework and use it in all my themes. It’s easy to use and it has an excellent collection of controls which can make your life easier when you deal with option panels. However, the documentation SUCKS!!! It SUCKS big time. Not because it lacks necessary information, but because how it gives you the exact feeling of finding a needle in the haystack. If you go to their documentation, you will literally feel lost. Why not try to search the documentation of “color” control, or “text” perhaps”.
It was a lot easier to find the required information when they were using github wiki. But now, with the redesign, it’s very tough. Their search doesn’t work as expected, gives you a lot of unnecessary information that you don’t need.
And oh, the funny thing is that in the WHOLE site, their github repository is not linked (as of the time of writing it). You simply can’t find a “DOWNLOAD” button, not even something that takes you to the original ReduxFramework repo! Heh, I submitted a ticket in their issue tracker and Dovy replied that he will take care of it. Maybe he is too busy to add a link in 3 months!
So go to ReduxFramework site, and scream “Where is the Mothe*fuck*ng download/fork link?”. No one will hear your scream, boy, no one. They are too busy in making PAID extensions.
I love ReduxFramework. I don’t like how it gives a negative impression from the website. I really don’t like that.
The Storyteller 
Honestly their documentation sucks. Also Redux’s SEO isn’t satisfactory compared to other platforms. The only way I got is to chat with dovy on skype on some issues. He’s pretty helpful there by the way. Thanks for the post.
That is the only reason i am still resisting from using it. Documentation Sucks.
Dovy, lead dev of Redux Framework here.
First, 2 months ago my wife had our twins (4th and 5th child). Out of the past 7 weeks we’ve been in the hospital 6 of those weeks. Hence, I am the acting dad and mom to our other 3 children and usually one of the twins. Before that my wife had pre-term labor and they stopped her labor twice. So that explains the last 3 months. 😉 Please be patient as I go through family trials.
Why do we (I) put our (my) effort into paid extensions? No one donates. We’ve put endless hours into support into the project and have had VERY little in donations. People are, however, willing to pay a little for extensions. We make extensions to justify the time we put in. We’re only paid through the sales we can generate. Surely you can appreciate that. Want us to spend more time on core functions and not extensions? Donate. You’d be among the few who are so willing.
You were upset about not being able to find things, well that’s due to the vanilla WordPress search, not us. We’ve installed Relevanssi and it seems to be helping quite a bit. I’ve also included the category name in the search results for each record, so you can figure out pretty easily what is what. I think you’ll be pleased with the results.
Now I hate to break it to you, but everything is the same as the GitHub wiki, just greatly expanded. Why is the documentation so extensive? We have that many options. We’re the only framework with 34 different fields any number of configurations for each. The GitHub wiki was quite basic and only documented 1/3 of the options. So now that search is working, it should make more sense. I invite you to look at the documentation of other WordPress frameworks. We have the most complete and extensive documentation by far.
As per your request I’ve also added a menu to the header of the docs page with a link to the repo, WordPress plugin, and extensions.
Lastly, this is an open source project. I have to support my family. We do premium extensions, but they don’t make us a ton of money. Know how much documentation pays us? $0.00. So while it’s fine to feel as you do, please realize you could still contribute to this open source project by way of documentation! How you ask? Make a gist and send it to us. We’ll replace our content with yours! Don’t just gripe because this amazingly free project doesn’t have the documentation that fulfills your every desire. Why did we remove it from GitHub? Because people whined that there wasn’t enough detail. So then we made the docs page, and now it sounds like you’re saying there’s too much detail… we can’t make everyone happy I guess.
Oh, and imagine how I feel when I look at donations (and sales) and then see this: http://reduxframework.com/showcase/envato/
Simply put, we can’t do endless work for free. I have 7 mouths to feed.
You get what you pay for. 🙂
I agree 100% on what you have written on Redux when it comes to the link to their own Github from their website to the git page. I was on the site last night and clicked that little banner on the right to go to download the latest version.
However with the documentation it is far superior to those like Vafpress or others similar. Sure the search is shocking, but that is not the issue of Redux site, that is the issue of WordPress as WordPress natively sucks at searching relevant content unless you use Relevanci plugin or similar.
As for the project, it gives you everything you want and includes extra modules which are awesome. I have bought Metaboxes addon and Widgets addon. Both provide incredible features to what I need, and both I feel are worth every cent in development as it saved me a fair bit of time.
I personally feel the extensions are a bit expensive, but not overpriced. Overpriced are what you consider something to be valued at.
What are your thoughts on what the costs should be to make it more affordable for the startup development company to add these addons to their product? Are you thinking make them much cheaper like addon apps where anyone and everyone can afford it, thus they make more sales? These models work very well, however these models mostly work when there is a large market that it is presented to.
I look forward to your thoughts on this.
@Muntasir Mahmud Aumio
What other frameworks have you used where the documentation is better? I will be interest to learn from your examples.
@Oritro Ahmed
What part of the documentation is missing? So far it covers all the things I have used in my own works, and I am a first time WP developer using Redux in a plugin.