Plugin Directory: Community

As one of two 3.org groups tasked with improving the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ 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 Directory, the Plugin Directory: Community (PDC) group has read through all the Potential WordPress.org Improvements and has weighed what ideas would best improve the community and would be manageable to do before development on WordPress 3.1 starts. This group is tasked with improving the user interaction with the directory, the authors, and the rest of the community. Here are the ideas that have made it to the final round of the selection process:

  • A standardized taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. for organizing plugins and making tags more relevant.
  • Allow filtering of plugin search results based on version compatibility.
  • Allow the community to publicly ‘Like’ plugins.
  • Allow plugin pages to display hash-style URLs from the Read Me file.
  • UIUI User interface Improvements for i8n support.
  • Allow users to publicly review plugins.
  • Small UI changes to the Plugin Directory
  • Plugin Adoption Stats
  • The formation of a Plugin Security Review Team.

PDC would like for each of you, members of the WordPress community, to look over these ideas and suggest ways of how they could be best implemented. We would like each of these ideas to be sustainable for the long term, meaning they would not create overwhelming work for people contributing to the community or have a negative impact on portions of the community.

To get the ball rolling with one of these ideas, the Plugin Security Review Team, we would like to suggest that responsibilities and obligations of this team be ramped up in stages. Instead of just throwing nearly 11,000 plugins at the team and having the them read every line of code, the team would pro-actively develop solutions that would aid developers in making their own plugin more secure. The Plugin Security Review Team could provide detailed tutorials, presentations, working examples, scanning programs, or any other ideas as they see fit.

The PDC group is open to ideas, suggestions, and help, feel free to contact any of our members: Peter Westwood, Austin Matzko, Dan Cole, Brian Layman, and Michael Torbert. Hopefully with the communities’ help and feedback we will be able to implement all of these ideas.

#3-org, #plugin-directory