The purpose of this session is to help plugin developers to prepare their plugins for the upcoming implementation of WordPress Plugin Directory 3.0. Years of experience in working with Joomla Extensions Directory data and my recent enrollment in the WordPress Plugin Directory gives me a possibility to advise how to make the transition from the old to the new directory smoothly for all parties involved: plugin developers, plugin users, and the directory team. Adjust to the new reality and discover new possibilities hidden in the new directory.
For everyone:
- how the way we browse plugins will change?
- how long can I use the old plugin directory?
- how will the embedded plugin directory be affected by this change?
- what’s new? what’s missing?
For plugin developers:
- how to prepare your plugin description?
- how to take advantage of the opportunity?
Video
Transcription
ELLIOT: Hello welcome to track B for our second talk of the day. Did everyone get good SWAG? Make sure you see the sponsors. It is good to pay your dues. Our talk today is with Aleksander who is the CEO of Perfect Dashboard and a VP of Joomla and an open source aficionado. He has also told me he is a fan of London parks and English tea rooms which is a first, so are you ready Alex.
ALEKSANDER:
(Computer crashed – small bit missing)
— that will be the first five you have, and then you read the TXT file. So if you have more than five of them, you should definitely change the order so that the most important five will be at the beginning of the readme TXT file. Then, as I told you, the installation tab is GAN. So if you require some special installation procedure, then you should move to the “frequently asked questions” section and then just ask a question like “How do I install this plugin?” You install it by all the information. And we’ve lost the screen. And we’re back. Perfect.
So if there is some special installation procedure, it is not like just go to your WordPress dashboard and install it, that’s the place to put some information about it.
Then, compatibility. If there are some compatibility issues within your plugin, you should definitely put that somewhere in the description, because there will be no information on the compatibility any more, as I have shown you.
Statistics. There will be no statistics available except for a number of active installs for the end user. So if you want to brag about it, then again brag about it in the description.
One tiny thing about the authors. As you may be able to see somewhere here, just move back — yeah. The authors here are not the same as authors as all contributors to plugin. There is a special tag called “authors header”, I guess, if I can remember it correctly, and you need to set that one to put the name of authors that will be shown on the plugin list. So if you don’t have that one already, that’s another handy thing to do before the new plugin repository comes in place.
Okay. Getting back to our list. And then there is one extra thing on top of it. There is an admin view, for extension developers. That’s a brand new thing. Stats are back in there, as of now. I can’t guarantee they will stay there, but as of now, they are there, but there is only available for plugin admins.
Your regular users won’t see that. You can, but that’s all we have right now. And as I’ve told you, those downloads per day count both download and updates. So that’s not the information on how many people, you know, have tried your plugin, so every time somebody updates your plugin, it counts as downloads. And that’s the fact that — if you’re not familiar with that one, you should remember this one as a take away.
Okay. So, my big ask to you is to help us test the new plugin repository. And no matter you are a user or a plugin developer, or a website developer, we need your input because we’ve been working with that for a long time. We’re trying to make it better, but we are aware that there are many things that should be improved in that, so that’s why we’re looking for input, go to WordPress.org/plugins/WP and provide your feedback, tell us what is wrong, and my plugin is not shown at certain keywords for on the first place, it is not a valid input, but every other is, and please do help us because we want make this tool better than the previous one. And without your input, it is difficult to see whether your find it helpful or not, really.
So like whether you find it more interesting search results thanks to that, or you find more of crap. So do tell us what you think. Okay. My name is Aleksander Kuczek and I turn web development businesses into moneymaking machines. If you want to get slides from this presentation, I will do a link to them shortly on Twitter.
Thank you. [applause].
ELLIOT: Okay, Bernhard is going around with a microphone now, so if you have any questions, hands in the air. We’ve got one here on the right.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hey, thanks for that. Really interesting. There was some talk about a year ago, it might actually have been at this WordCamp, where the results that were returned that some of the older plugins that hadn’t been updated for say like two or three years might be deprioritised in the results. Has there been any implemented in that respect?
ALEKSANDER: That’s a very hot topic, I must say. Our current state is that all plugins are there, no matter they are old or not, but if something has not been updated in the last two years, it will — the position will be decreased significantly. So unless you’re looking for something very rare, or you’re going — or you’re looking for — or you’ll go to the very last page you want to see the old plugins.
ELLIOT: I think there’s a hand here, as well.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I work for Outlandish, and we produce WP packages, which is the composer repository for WordPress plugins, kind of wrapper for. Are there any changes under the hood in the way the new repository represents plugins over SVN, or this kind of thing, or is it simply just a cosmetic change to the way the interface works and the way the sorting algorithm works?
ALEKSANDER: Okay. If I understood your question right, you’re asking whether we have changed something within the way we organise plugins or the search engine itself?
FROM THE FLOOR: It is more in the in terms of how the plugins are stored, and in the SVN in the large SVN repository?
ALEKSANDER: No, we keep it exactly the same way it was. Actually, if you can go now and see the new version and it is based on exactly the same data we have from the old repository, both interfaces and both search engines use exactly the same data. So we’re using the same structure. But for example, as I’ve mentioned over, we’re using in a different way, like the old repository was taking all information about tax, and the new one is taking only the five more recent. But it is still the same as the VN, and in this case nothing has changed.
Good.
Any more questions?
FROM THE FLOOR: Just to clarify, as well, the author header tag, is that — I mean obviously there’s the contributor’s tag you can set in the plugin header; is that the same thing, or is this a completely separate tag?
ALEKSANDER: I think it is author/header. That’s the name of the tag that you should be looking for.
ELLIOT: Hands up, any more questions? One at the back on the left.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I was just wondering, you’ve removed quite a bit of information from the interface, like installation instructions, but also compatibility info. I was wondering what is the reasoning behind those choices is, if you know.
ALEKSANDER: Well, I asked this to my senior team members quite often, I must say, and for some of those, the reason is obvious. Like nobody, or hardly anyone is using compatibility information. Like, we don’t update others, so it is just a space that is being used. In terms of installation information, the reasoning behind that was that most of the plugins can be used — well, installation is pretty simple. You don’t need any special instruction to install a plugin, and if you need one in, then the frequently-asked questions would be the better place to go. So the idea was that they started before with a blank page, and they start to fill in with the elements, not looking at the old directory, but thinking what actually is needed and useful, and then they’ve discussed the missing, or we have discussed the missing parts and decided on the fate of some small things that will be gone. Thanks to that, we have way clearer interface, but of course it is also — there are informations missing, and that’s correct.
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I have another question, a sort of related question. Given that the compatibility information is not there and, as you say, presumably you’ve got information that nobody was selecting from the dropdown and checking whether the plugin was compatible with them, is there going to be recommended or guidance on how to express compatibility issues in the readmes, particularly for plugin authors who perhaps English isn’t their first language? So a way to make sure users know this plugin will not work if you’re on version 4.5, for example.
ALEKSANDER: If I were you, I wouldn’t expect any official guidance from the WordPress plugin team, but I think there will be some trend and people will start to follow it. Like, if the big players will start to put information about the compatibility in a certain way, then others will follow. I hope that again, for most of the plugins that will not be the case, because they’re just compatible with everything we have, and they have backwards compatibility and they have — they are compatible with the new version. So that’s again, I hope that it will work in that way, and the compatibility information will be more if you’re compatible only with certain databases, or you need a certain version of PHP that is higher than the basic base WordPress requirement. So I think that will go more for this than for compatibility with certain WordPress versions. Because WordPress is going into that trend that every plugin should be compatible with every modern. I hope that answers your question,.
FROM THE FLOOR: Yes.
ALEKSANDER: Perfect. Any more questions or may I go home? [Laughter].
FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I see that you say that they might be removing the previous versions, the previous revisions. What happens if somebody updates a plugin but it actually breaks, and you need to roll back to a previous version?
ALEKSANDER: You still have an access to an SVN, I guess, but it is like you don’t have it, you don’t have links on the page, because that’s again this WordPress trend. We should all be updated and we should all run the newer version of WordPress and the newer version of plugin, and it should be working. I know it’s not always the case, and I see it regularly. So that may be the thing but that’s the way WordPress goes, and we want everyone — maybe in a few years, there won’t be even an update button, everything will update seamlessly, and we would all like to make that happen and make sure it won’t break websites, but there is still a long way ahead of us to get there.
FROM THE FLOOR: Yeah, just a follow-up of that. We have several problems with, you know, tax being deleted from the plugins directory. So we stop using WP packages and then we point to a certain version, and then I don’t know, the plugin updates to version 1.6 and then we’re still on 1.5, and then 1.5 doesn’t exist any more. And then when we update, boom. So I don’t know, it might be for, you know, for search purposes, use the last version but not delete the old ones. Never delete the tag version from SVN.
ALEKSANDER: There is no reason to delete any versions from SVN. That’s the purpose, to keep all the versions there. I’m just saying that there won’t be links displayed, but if you’re a plugin developer, obviously you should keep all the old versions there, and don’t remove them. Yeah, that’s a very good point.
FROM THE FLOOR: Sorry to harp about this one, because I think losing the easeability to get a rollback on an old one is going to be a huge minus, so my question is if the tags are still there, will the automatic zip still be there as well? Because if you can work out what the URL is going to be for the previous version, will you still be able to download that zip, because the link is missing from the page?
ALEKSANDER: Yeah, that’s only links missing from the page, we’re talking about the interface change. But as I told you, there is a huge discussion whether that should be back or not. So I will bring this feedback to the next meeting on Wednesday, and tell them that you did insist you need them.
FROM THE FLOOR: Thank you.
ALEKSANDER: I hope this will help.
FROM THE FLOOR: Sure. Even if it is just the last three, four, five, something like that, I think it will be helpful.
ALEKSANDER: I’ll do my best. I’m a junior member there, so I don’t have much to say, but I’ll do my best to bring that case there.
FROM THE FLOOR: Plus one for that. I think it is pretty crazy to think that everyone is going to be happy interacting with kind of SVN and stuff. You’ve got a whole millions of users, frankly, that would be pretty uncomfortable, or not even aware of that system, frankly. So, I think not even just plus one, but plus 100 to keeping the old links, because frankly I think you’re going to end up with real trouble with that in the future. So please, keep it for the users.
ALEKSANDER: I’ll do my best, I promise. Okay.
ELLIOT: No pressure.
ALEKSANDER: Yeah, so if you have any more specific questions or questions related to your own plugin, or your own use case, you will be able to find me around, I’ll be in the Happiness Bar for sure, if you want to ask anything. Thank you for your time. [applause].
ELLIOT: Okay, we have a little break now, and then after that, we return at 11.50 to hear Edd Hurst talk about migrating content. So go have a wander around, have a coffee, grab some swag and we’ll be back here at 11.50. Thank you.