It would be good to list the plugin author(s) in the “About this Plugin” sidebar listing on review threads on pages like http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-name
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Jen Mylo
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
Welcome to Meta (with a feature!)
During the WordPress Community Summit pre-planning sessions, it became obvious that there’s not a lot of good communication about what we do, plan, and code for the WordPress.org website itself. So, after a bit of chatter, Make-Meta was born. This is where we plan on talking about changes to the WordPress.org site, as well soliciting feedback for feature ideas. Consider it a community site; we don’t always know what the best way to make the website work is, so feedback is not just welcome, but encouraged.
In order to kick things off properly, I figured I’d announce a new feature: Reviews!
After a lot of discussion, it became clear that a “plugin review” concept was very much desired by the community in general. So we implemented reviews, but didn’t bother to limit it to just plugins. So now, plugins and themes can have reviews.
In order to keep things straight, reviews are tied to ratings. In order to rate a plugin, you must write a review as well. All the old ratings are still there and won’t be going away (we use those, after all), but if you want to change your rating in the future, well, explain it. Tell your side of the story. What’s broken? What works? What’s the best and the worst of the code? How can the plugin or theme author improve it?
Communication is important, and “support” is only half of the equation. Feedback is critical, and hopefully, the new Reviews system will go a long way to improving communication between the many millions of users of code we host on WordPress.org and the many thousands of contributors who write the themes and plugins that we all use every day. And all reviews go into our forums and can be commented on by everybody, just in case somebody needs some extra help.
(Note to Plugin/Theme authors: You can subscribe to your reviews alone via RSS feed, but the email subscription is cross-tied to the support-forum email subscriptions. If you’re subscribed to those, you will get review emails as well.)
There won’t be a lot of reviews at first, but hey, that’s where you come in! Just to get everybody started, I went ahead and wrote a couple of reviews to kick things off. So if you want to see it in action immediately, you can see them here:
http://wordpress.org/support/view/theme-reviews/twentytwelve
http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/hotfix
These are accessible for any plugin or theme through the “Reviews” tab. Alternately, try to rate a plugin or theme and you’ll be sent to the review form as well.
Note that this is “iteration 1″ of the feature. I expect to make many visual and stylistic changes over the next couple of weeks, and perhaps add a few new features. If you have a great idea for a feature or enhancement, feel free to comment and let me know. (Don’t bother me with the visual-only stuff yet, I know the CSS needs some love. Also, reviews don’t really display all that well on profiles yet; I know, working on it.)
BTW, the majority of the code to power the reviews came from our own Scott Reilly, who is, frankly, a genius. Give him mega props.
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Rarst
For some reason review form on those example links is filled with text of your review, which doesn’t quite make sense?..
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
Heh. I forgot to handle the “not logged in” case. Fixed.
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Mert Yazicioglu
Great news!
By the way, there is a textbox right after the text “Select the version of WordPress you are using”.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
Yes, that’s a freeform version box. Could be made more obvious, I grant you.
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Austin Passy
Props Scott.
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nofearinc
It’s an awesome feature that would prevent plugin/theme authors from getting anonymous 1-star ratings with no elaboration. Not sure if that’s implemented, but a minimum review length might be handy as well (for the same reason).
The email communication is always good to have, if possible, as an extra extension to the other notification system.
And welcome to Meta as well
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Shane Pearlman
just wrote a ton of feedback and it vanished – checking to see if i am on pending status or if I should just sigh and feel sad.
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Shane Pearlman
oh balls. ok the short version:
This is EPIC. So Glad to see it.
- add “7 reviews” somewhere on description right rail http://cl.ly/KYh1 – wonder if we filter by version like the apple store?
- would be nice to show the version of WP reviewed on the theme: http://cl.ly/KY1W (I don’t see it) and the version of the theme / plugin the review is based upon. Bad version can happen and it is nice to know.
- love that we can reply to reviews (thank you thank you), from a simple ux perspective, might be nice to have a “reply” link next to “0 comments”
- look forward to seeing a hint of “credibility” added to the reviewer. Something which tells you what they have contributed without having to click on their name – maybe badges or just simple text with “37 reviews | 4 plugins | 2 themes | 18 core patches | core contributor | 108 relevant articles” – although I have no idea how to do the last one, I do believe that is a form of credibility that would be nice to track.
that all I can remember with the time I have.
Go team!
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Mike Schinkel
One concern about version ratings is that most plugins have very few ratings across version, splitting them across versions makes their ratings even less valid. And it’s relevant if a plugin has had bad ratings all it’s prior versions but the new version is posted that gets high ratings from a handful of friends. Not suggesting version ratings are bad but that they will have unintended consequences which need to be considered before diving in with another change.
Frankly I’d like to see multiple dimensional ratings that not only indicate rating but indicate a confidence level based on the number of ratings. 4.5 stars from 500 people means a lot more to me than 5 stars from 3 people. Maybe this could be accomplished with color, from dull gray to bright yellow and several levels between on an exponential scale. A small number of 5 star ratings get you a dull grey 5 stars and 500 four stars get you bright yellow stars?
As far as credibility, I wish they’d factor in StackExchange’s WordPress Answers rep. Just saying…
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Matt Mullenweg
Should we zero out all the old ratings, they don’t have any context.
You should be able to click a review number bar (under the stars) and see all the reviews at that level.
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Shane Pearlman
There is a wealth of plugins & themes that have earned a strong (or mixed or poor) reputation over the years. Until this new feature matures it would leave .org users with little guidance.
Maybe we could do something like apple did with app version?
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
Lets give it some time before dumping the old ratings data, see how well it works.
The bars link is a good idea, I’ll look into it.
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Ray
Question about moderating reviews. What if someone is trolling a plugin author or plugin? It’s bound to happen. Is a report mechanism in the works?
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Shane Pearlman
+1 on this.
There are comments on reviews, but last thing we need is ungentlemanly behavior being encouraged.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
It’s all in the support forums, our normal mods have all the same magical powers there and can handle it as needed.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
BTW, regarding reporting, the “modlook” tag should be added to any reviews that need attention.
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Michael Torbert
This is very awesome. Imagine if for every one star rating one of my plugins has ever received, I got some useful feedback that could turn it into a 5 star.
Great work Otto! -
Mike Little
This is great. Looking forward to it maturing.
BTW: There’s no Subscribe form in the sidebar. So I had to comment to be able to tick the notify box.
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scribu
Works pretty well. One thing I would like is if the star rating showed up somewhere while viewing the review in the support forums. For example, when I go here:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/great-plugin-8
It would be nice to have the rating given by that user in the sidebar or on the left, under the user details.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
I decided to make it a little more obvious and put it under the topic title.
Note that I wasn’t saving the data correctly before to implement this, but I am now. So ratings made starting now (including edits to existing reviews) will show the stars from now on.
Check out my original 2 review topics to see the stars on them.
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Joost de Valk
Awesomness! This blog is not in the feed list on http://make.wordpress.org/ yet
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
There’s a reason for that. Looking at redoing that in a different way.
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Ryan McCue
I don’t have posting privileges here, but I’m willing to work on this as mentioned at #wpcs. Should I file this on Trac?
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
You know, I personally don’t like wp.org refinements being on the core trac. I think it’s additional clutter. Some may disagree.
Maybe we need to come up with a better way and/or a separate trac. Regardless, let’s sort out some ideas before putting anything on trac about it. Like we discussed, a simple design would be good, just a way to sort of showcase what’s going on everywhere, sort of thing.
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Shane Pearlman
We’re probably down to contribute some code for .org as well. My support team let me have it yesterday with issues they are facing that could be truly easily resolved with less than a day of code. I told them to write me a blog post and then I’d share it with the community. If you buy off, then we can discuss contributing.
Example:
A simple message at the top of the support tab would be a serious tool. There is no easy way to set expectations for users. We have had 2 people this week complain that the plugin is unsupported and write a bunch of vitriol when no one replied to their post on .org in 24 hours on a weekend. We need a way to let people know how much support we can offer, and when we are out on holiday etc.
A quick comp example: http://cl.ly/KceM
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Jane Wells
I also think they should not be on core trac, but a separate trac or whatever.
I did a sketch a while back for a make landing page, then revised it at wpcs. Will look for it and post as a proposal. I think we didn’t move on it at the time bc it wasn’t perfect, but it was a good example of letting perfect be the enemy of the better. Almost anything would be better than the RSS collection we have now. I went and looked at a bunch of other FLOSS projects’ Get Involved landing pages today (list at http://make.wordpress.org/community/floss-community-programs/ ), and think what we talked about doing at wpcs is still a good idea.
Side note: as all the new groups get going, there will be a lot of crossover with the Meta group as feature requests and or design/content work comes out of the new groups. We should figure out how/where to handle that, so improvements aren’t worked on in parallel/vacuums, but together.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
I’m perfectly okay with changing the base make site, we just need a design or an idea of one.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
For reference, ratings were acting weird and wonky. I think I’ve finally sorted out the issues there though. If your rating didn’t appear to save properly, or isn’t showing up, just re-save your review with the fixed rating, and it should sort itself out.
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Dougal Campbell
Buglet? Can’t seem to login directly from a review page view. Redirects back to same page, but not logged in.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
Login appears to work fine for me on the review view pages. No reason I can think of for them to be special in that respect, actually, the view is just a view like any other there, with no special login handling code on them.
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Samuel Wood (Otto)
Bug fix: it is now possible for a person to actually review more than one theme and have it saved. If you tried and found your old review removed, whoops. Sorry about that. It works okay now.
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Marko Heijnen
I just received my first review and the mail wasn’t clear for me. The Subject only has the title of the review and not showing about which plugin it is
Jesper van Engelen 1:36 pm on March 29, 2013 Permalink |
I agree with this. In my opinion, it would be good to have a list of references to WordPress resources made in the topic in the sidebar. The links could easily be analyzed and differentiation different types of content could be easily made, allowing you to show a list for quickly navigating to related material, such as referenced Codex entries, plugins, forum topics and user profiles.
Jen Mylo 1:11 am on April 20, 2013 Permalink |
That sounds like a pretty different goal. I mostly am just looking for the author to be an apparent piece of metadata in this area.