Plugin Directory Meeting Summary (8/11)

This is a summary of the 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 chat from August 11. (Slack log)

Attendees: @justingreerbbi, @SergeyBiryukov, @mapk, @webdevmattcrom, @kevinwhoffman, @qriouslad, @liljimmi, @dd32, @samuelsidler, @michaelarestad, @afragen, @lunacodes, @gibrown, @clorith, @obenland

Topics:

• Status of M6
  Five tickets have been closed so far, including one that cropped up this week. Due to a knowledge dependency, #1691 might need to be bumped to M7. Patches in #1579 are commit ready.
• Review community feedback
  We decided to postpone discussions on the two items with the most feedback, read more links and plugin cards, until @mapk can participate and give his input this week.

  Initially the step back towards everything on one page on single plugin pages was the desire to explore solutions outside of the tabs in general. Designers weren’t sure that tabs were the right solution, especially the way they are currently implemented. Tabs indicate that each section warrants similar importance. In many areas certain sections just aren’t as important as others, so displaying these on a single page helped with creating proper hierarchy. A lot of are used to the tab architecture so they probably expect a central navigation, but if the information is arranged correctly it might not be needed either. Forcing a Read More on every section is not very helpful though, Screenshots and FAQs for example could be handled much differently. There are already two tickets that handle that, #1810 to make FAQs more accordion-like and #1828 to make screenshots a gallery sort of thing. Changelogs could be limited to the last n releases of a plugin to make it more manageable and possibly merged into the Contributors & Developers section. Action items, as a result of the discussion, include completing the aforementioned two tickets and finding a better place for the changelog. With that three out of five read mores would be eliminated and we can take another look and iterate from there.

  Another part of the new directory that received a lot of feedback is the simplified plugin cards on the front-page and search results. @mapk is in favor of including more information, but it needs to be the right information. Ultimately we should be very conscious about why we add more data to a view, to ensure we’re providing the right data for users. Four pieces of data are currently being discussed: Active installs, Last Updated Date, Author, and Compatibility. It’s hard to tell if the data is right because search results aren’t ideal, so we agreed to focus on improving the plugin detail page first, while also improving search, then circle back around to the cards once we have a more accurate search and can run real user tests.

The next meeting is on Thursday August 18, 00:00 UTC.

#plugin-directory