New for Extend/Plugins:
If a user clicks the “Broken” link, it will record the click as usual, but now also redirect them to the start a new topic support form, and nicely ask them to leave a new topic explaining what’s broken. Hopefully, this will make the broken button more useful.
Note: if you want to test this, feel free, but realize that you’re marking the plugin as broken by doing so, whether you leave a new topic or not. So please, go back afterwards and change your vote to “works” if it really does work.
Ipstenu 10:14 pm on August 27, 2010 Permalink
Sweet!
Ofer Wald 11:40 pm on August 27, 2010 Permalink
How about doing the same for the dreaded single star vote?
Denis 11:56 pm on August 27, 2010 Permalink
Is there an RSS feed that plugin authors can use to grab all of these forum threads? If not, it would be even more useful… Especially if advertised.
Otto 12:33 am on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Every forum thread made via this manner gets tagged with the plugin’s slug. So you can subscribe to a plugin’s topic list that way.
Example: http://wordpress.org/tags/simple-facebook-connect has an RSS feed on it of http://wordpress.org/support/rss/tags/simple-facebook-connect .
Email notification hopefully coming soon.
hakre 7:33 am on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Feedburner offers Email Integration for RSS.
Denis 9:45 am on August 28, 2010 Permalink
That’s not good enough. It’s fine when you’ve a plugin or two. But when you’ve dozens, it becomes a lot of feeds to track.
Moreover, these tags point to multitudes of support requests that are related to WP bugs and incompatibilities introduced by third party plugins — stuff that I don’t even want to be reading.
What’s needed are two unified feeds. The first should lead plugin devs to all open threads related to his plugins, regardless of tags. The second should lead plugin devs to the subset of these threads that were opened by the broken button.
Using tags for any of these two feeds is not an option unless the community spirit and attitude have improved dramatically. When I was answering support requests in the WP forums, the tag I was using got dropped in a hostile effort to move it out of the hot tags page.
Otto 6:22 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Better ways of notification are coming as well. Email notification is next on my list, followed by handling tags better.
One step at a time, man.
Denis 6:42 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Personally, I don’t read emails any more than Knuth:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
I do subscribe to RSS feeds, however. So if anything, that works better.
Otto 10:12 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
It’s a combo deal. Emails come first, because though I use RSS and agree with you, the majority want the emails. Emailing an existing feed is simpler than emailing a non-existent one.
Matt 4:21 am on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Denis, I’m sorry it’s not good enough. it’s better than before. And it’s being worked on.
Chip Bennett 3:19 am on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Next step: change the vote not to record until a new forum topic is posted.
(Either way, very cool stuff, Otto!)
Rich Pedley 7:20 am on August 28, 2010 Permalink
oh yes that would be nice. Then add automatic changing of vote to works once thread is marked resolved… Oh sorry I think I just saw a cuckoo in the clouds.
hakre 7:34 am on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Yeah, nice! I’ll play a bit with it and let you know
Denis 9:52 am on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Adding to my last comment… Isn’t there a risk that end users report plugins as broken when they run into a WP bug or some incompatibilities introduced by their theme or other plugins?
Pross 1:19 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Maybe the author should verify its broken?
Devin Reams 2:06 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Are you really suggesting that doesn’t already happen?
Otto 6:20 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
They were doing that already. Now they have a chance to report the problem.
Ignoring their vote because they refuse to explain it would be rather unfair. The number of people who think it doesn’t work is valid data, regardless of why they think that. This isn’t ebay, where one negative means nobody trusts it.
Denis 6:35 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
I believe you’re misunderstanding the question. On occasion, users report things as broken when it really isn’t. For instance:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sem-admin-menu/
One reports CSS is loaded, always. Which is an enhancement at best…
The next is an incompatibility with another plugin…
Otto 3:33 am on August 29, 2010 Permalink
No, I understand just fine. However, if they’re reporting it broken, then that’s between you and them. What, we’re supposed to make somebody jump through hoops or make it harder or something?
scribu 5:05 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
some info from the readme is missing: http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14719
Otto 5:42 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Not a bug, Matt told me to remove them.
Ipstenu 2:54 am on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Otto, would that be why some authors don’t show up on their plugins? I don’t seem to be listed as an author on any of my plugins, and that …. Well, makes it hard for people to know how to get in touch with me for support
Otto 7:52 pm on September 2, 2010 Permalink
Ipstenu: No, this was because your plugin didn’t have your correct wp.org username in the Contributors: line in the readme.txt. Caps count there too.
I’ve just modified this to show those author listings correctly. Although, if it can’t find you as a valid user, you get no gravatar and no link (because there’s nothing in profiles to link to). This will at least prevent the link weirdness we once had on the authors listing.
Stephen Cronin 12:48 am on September 6, 2010 Permalink
As a plugin author, the more links to my site the better!
But that’s not important. What’s important is this:
As a user, I’ve found that *most* plugins have extra information, comments, etc on the plugin home page on the authors site. The removed link to the plugin home page is something I clicked a lot.
I take Matt’s argument that this link can be added to the content area, but a) the vast majority of plugins aren’t going to have this and b) those that does will have it in a slightly different location.
End result, instead of having a *consistent place* on *all* plugin pages where I can easily find this link, I have to search for it and in many cases it won’t even be there. There’s a term for that sort of thing:
Usability fail
The link to the author’s site is less important, but the link to the plugin’s homepage (on the author’s site) should remain (in my opinion) – because that makes the site more usable for the users.
scribu 5:51 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
An explanation would be nice. Spamming can’t be a valid reason, since you can insert links directly into the description.
Otto 5:57 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
Dunno. You’ll have to ask him. Anyway, I don’t think the design there is final yet, so they may make a comeback. We’ve basically just been playing with it, to see what looks and works better. Eventually I hope to have some useful stats for authors as well, for example.
Bringing any of this up on trac is probably premature. Email me directly if you have concerns, I read them all and respond to most. otto at ottodestruct.com
Denis 6:44 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
I fail to see any incentive to write a free plugin if you don’t even get some web traffic as a result.
Alex M. 8:42 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
If that’s the only reason you’re writing plugins, then I feel sorry for you Denis.
Otto 10:18 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
I gotta say that I think those links drive very little traffic. Matt said at #wcsav that I remember (because we used my plugin to do it), that something like 20% of his ma.tt traffic now comes from his facebook links (which are auto-published by SFC). There’s better ways to drive traffic back to you. Developing is generally done to fill a need, not to drive traffic.
scribu 11:57 pm on August 28, 2010 Permalink
As a counter-example, about 20% of my referrall trafic (10% overall) come from wp.org
Otto 3:34 am on August 29, 2010 Permalink
If it’s that big a deal, put your links in the description of the plugin. You can put links there, you know.
Matt 4:25 am on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Plugin links are a little redundant now that each plugin has a page on the directory. If someone has a page on their own site as well easy (and more effective) to link from the main content area.
Author links only work for single-author plugins, for multiple author plugins (which we want to encourage) it’s broken so better to build it off the commit list, so each author gets credit.
Alphawolf 3:00 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Well, if it remains like this, we have a useless profile field “Website URL ” then:
(which funnily enough sais “Give yourself some link love.”
)
It’s useless if the website URI neither shows up on the profile pages nor on the plugin pages anymore.
On a side note, the wp.org repository would be the only plugin repository I know that doesn’t link back to the dev’s website at least. Personally I found some really nice blogs worth subscribing through the plugin pages (such as Viper’s, Ozh’ etc.).
Matt 3:11 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Our goal is to drive even more back to plugin authors than we do now, but give some time for the iterations to finish up.
scribu 5:24 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Thanks for the explanation Matt. Makes sense now.
Michael H. asks to move the author info back to the top:
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/14725
Matt 10:14 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
That’s nice, but not really useful at this stage. If you have something you really want on that page maybe just send me an email.
scribu 5:27 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Speaking of developer site links, I think we can all agree that it makes sense to show them on profiles.wordpress.org (they were there, but vanished at some point)
Matt 10:14 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Definitely — not sure what’s up with those pages. The URLs are wrong too.
filosofo 8:33 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
With profiles.wordpress.org being pushed into greater prominence, can we either fix or remove the activity stream? For example, it shows my last core trac activity as having occurred in March.
I will volunteer to make the fix.
Rich Pedley 7:44 am on August 30, 2010 Permalink
Have to agree with this, it’s been like that for months.
John James Jacoby 6:07 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Nice work Otto! Like the changes so far and know it will only improve as you iterate.
Otto 9:12 pm on August 29, 2010 Permalink
Thanks! I think a lot of people aren’t getting the “iteration” concept here.
Alphawolf 1:27 pm on August 30, 2010 Permalink
I’m sure you are aware already, but just for the sake of completeness, the short description above the tabbed navigation doesn’t convert Markdown currently. But that’s just a minor minor issue that came to my eyes.
Otto 3:28 pm on August 30, 2010 Permalink
The short description should be text only. Markdown is not allowed there.
Alphawolf 3:40 pm on August 30, 2010 Permalink
Sorry, my fault then.