Been giving a lot of thought to how to give plugin authors more control over their plugin pages. In WordPress custom headers have been hugely beneficial in people’s ability to make a theme their own without having to be a designer. (And designers can make them really sing.)

As an experiment we’ve turned on custom headers for the plugin directory. If you’d like to try out this feature:

  1. Make a 772×250 pixel jpeg or png. (No animated GIFs. :) )
  2. Check it in to your plugin’s SVN directory with the path assets/banner-772x250.(jpg|png). Note that the assets directory is added to your plugin’s root directory, not trunk.
  3. On the next plugin directory refresh (every 15 minutes or so) you should see your image start showing up on the page.

For an example of this in action, check out Hello Dolly, natch. Our goal is to mainly see how people use them, so if you try this out leave comment below with a link to your plugin!

Final note: this is just an experiment, and there is a 98.254% chance the dimensions, placement, and text overlay for this header will change in the future, or the idea might not work at all. But I think it’s a nice toe in the water for letting authors really make their plugin pages shine.