Core Plugin Infrastructure

As many of you know, last Thursday’s dev chat resulted in a coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. plugins research team team (for lack of a better term). Basically, our job is to try to come up with a list of tools that should be supplied for all core plugins, in order to allow teams of developers to be effective and efficient. It’s only been a few days so far, but we wanted to update everyone on our progress.

First, we started a new IRC channel on freenode to discuss core plugins. If you’re interested in offering suggestions or ideas, share them in #wordpress-core-plugins. The channel is logged at https://irclogs.wordpress.org/ as well, so feel free to put your ideas there even if no one is presently chatting. I’m sure a few of us will look at the logs (I know I do).

We also started discussing the infrastructure that is needed. It seems that plugins already have a good SVNSVN Subversion, the popular version control system (VCS) by the Apache project, used by WordPress to manage changes to its codebase. system in place, which is great. Additionally we think core pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party teams need tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. (which we already have, but it needs some work), and mailing lists. The way we see it, core plugins should have most of the tools available to WordPress core developers, since they’ll be doing the same basic thing on a smaller scale.

There’s still a lot to do, including coming up with suggestions on how core plugins should be developed, how developers will be added to or removed from a core plugin team, figuring out if any of the tools or processes would benefit all plugins (not just core plugins), etc. We’d love to get more input on these areas, either here or in #wordpress-core-plugins. Please remember though that we aren’t discussing what core plugins should be called, whether or not they’re a good idea, how plugins will become core plugins, or whether my mom’s a core plugin. We’re just trying to come up with a set of tools that would help the developers, and some basic best-practices for plugin development and team building.

#core-plugins