Plugin Directory Chat on Oct 5th
I know, it got quiet. There were things.
They’ll be picking back up next month though! Come with your thinking hats on. Can’t make it? Leave comments on the above post 😁
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Forums Status Update (Sept 12)
Subscriptions should be working again.
Feeds have _moved_ and I’m really sorry about that. Hopefully we’ll get an nginx redirect in there sooner rather than later but basically it’s this:
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/akismet/feed/We’re using WordPress now, so any time you see a view you want to follow in RSS, slap `/feed/` on the end and it will probably work.
There’s also this URL:
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/akismet/activehowever, as you will notice, there is no ‘feed’ for it. Those are custom (non default WP) views and are all support threads with Closedand Resolvedtfiltered out, then sorted by last reply. We’re working on feeds for those and the old plugin committer feeds. I want that back too. Right now, I suggest you use the per-plugin feed to get a list of your new bugs etc, and then subscribe to the post (or add it to favorites).Sadly, ‘cost overruns’ have been the story of this migration. We had hoped to be done with everything by the 5th, but that proved a gross underestimate.
We know there are a lot of ‘smaller’ features everyone loves and have gotten used to making their lives easier that we’re now doing without. It sucks. Trust me here, the mods have ‘lost’ more tools than anyone else. This upgrade had to happen, though.
Also the reason I’m closing these posts to comments when I make them is I have no additional information to provide. Historically, if I leave them open people will posts complaints and rants (which I can do nothing about save sympathize), bug report (which we either already know about, or should have been posted elsewhere), or ‘thanks’ (which we all appreciate, but get spammy). And pinging me on Slack won’t get you any answers more than I’ve posted. This is what I know as I know it.
All I have for you now is a plea to be patient. This is a massive undertaking that for a long time was deemed impossible. But slowly, as we clean up the mess, things will get better and the pros of the move will reveal themselves. Like having Akismet actually catch spam for a change.
Please check Support Forums: Meta Trac before filing a bug report/complaint. And if you have suggestions for fixes, jump in and let us know! The bonus of being on bbPress now is that if there are plugins that can do what we need, we can actually use them!
Thanks.
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Gary Pendergast
WP_Hook: Next Generation Actions and Filters
WordPress 4.7 will contain a significant re-architecture of how hooks work. Please read the post on make/core for the full details, and test your plugins!
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Forums Status Update (Sept 7)
Happy 4.6.1 day.
- Reviews are back.
- Plugin authors and contributors are listed as authors and contributors
- RSS feeds for individual plugin forums are working
- Topic subscriptions should be working. Existing subs are still being imported.
The direct urls to your reviews will be
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/akismet/reviews/#new-post— I don’t know if that’s forever.The amount of data being imported is causing everything to take longer than expected, in order to do this without crashing the servers. Which would be bad. That’s also why some posts are showing out of order. This is the biggest bbPress install ever, I suspect…
ETA on everything? We don’t know. It’s all taking longer than we hoped.
Akismet has also been acting a prat and spamming people so if that happens, swing by the #forums slack and ask if they can have a look for you 🙂 Please ask nicely and offer coffee.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Forum Update Status (Sept 5)
Summary: A great many things have been improved. Paramount was getting the data over (done!), syncing review stars with their new post IDs (done), and making the forums run faster (in progress).
Please note: There was no way to actually test this properly before moving over, so while this is frustrating for everyone, the moderators have had to be quite aggressive in deleting repetitive reports of what’s broken. If you’ve found something that isn’t on the bugs and broken things list, please leave a reply there. Otherwise the answer is “As soon as we can get it done, it’ll be done.”
If you want to be super helpful, please make sure your fellow developers read the posts 🙂
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Plugin Reviews Disabled (And More about the Support Forums)
Reviews will be broken until about September 5.
This is directly related to the support forum maintenance.
Per @jmdodd:
We’ll do our best to keep this window short, but for now the choice was between closing reviews for 4 days or closing all of the support forums for 24 to 48 hours.
The Meta team felt (and I personally agree) that it is far more important to have support forums than the reviews. And the support forums were unsustainable. So while this is a wrench in your plugins, it’s far far better than no forums at all for Labor Day Weekend.
Updated Sept 2 0233
From @otto42
Consider this an announcement: all plugin/theme connections to the forums are currently considered broken. We expected that. It will take a few days to restore this, and that’s considered acceptable losses, for now. We will be working to fix these issues over the next few days, and it will be corrected as we get to it. In other words, we are aware of the issues and working to fix them.
Updated Sept 2 1628
You may have noticed you can’t do some things in the forums anymore. This is known. Please read Forum Bugs and Broken Things before you complain. Here’s a list of what you’re probably trying to figure out. ALL of these are being working on. Don’t fret. Enjoy your weekend.
- Plugin authors can’t sticky
- Plugin committer/author support views don’t work
- Plugin authors can’t resolve threads
- Pinned topics are unpinned in plugin forums
- Plugin Authors aren’t labelled as Plugin Authors
- Cannot subscribe to plugin forums
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Reviewing the Revamped Guidelines
Thank you everyone for being patient about this.
This summer was spent re-writing and editing and tweaking the guidelines. I ripped them down, sat and spelled out what they meant, then I rewrote them to be more clear. Then I got the plugin review team to review the changes. Then I had a group of people at WCNYC Contributor Day review them.
Finally, I moved it all to a GitHub repo and started to ask smaller groups to review it. Then we had a quick rebranding and that all brings us here.
I would like everyone in the community to read these proposed updates to the Plugin Directory Guidelines.
WordPress.org Plugin Guidelines
At the risk of sounding trite, pull requests and issues are welcome.
If you feel a guideline’s explanation is unclear, please create an issue or a pull request with what you feel should be changed and why. All grammar/spelling corrections are greatly welcome. We’re trying to write these for all levels of developers, as well as people who may not speak English proficiently. Using words like ‘obsequious’ should be avoided (nb: That’s mostly to me who uses those words regularly).
All feedback should be opened as issues in the tracker.
Let the games begin!
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justingreerbbi
🙂
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Reedyseth
Awesome work Mika, it is always good to have the documentation up to date !
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Robin W
Just read my way through them – love them, very clear, easy to understand – great work !
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Luke Cavanagh
Looks very complete.
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Andrey "Rarst" Savchenko
I have opened issue about “considered GPL” clause, see https://github.com/Ipstenu/wporg-plugin-guidelines/issues/10
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
FYI, you guys don’t have to tell me when you add issues 🙂 I get emails for it 😉 All good.
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Ahmad Awais
Good stuff, Mika, wouldn’t maintain a single markdown file had been easy to browse and better approach?
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
I thought about that for a long time, and realized by making each it’s own file, we would have less chance of a merge conflict when people are working on multiple guidelines at once. It would have been easier reading I agree, but it’s easier to edit this way 🙂
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James Huff
One markdown file for everything would be easier to read in general yes, but harder to collaborate on.
With one markdown file for each guideline, you can propose changes or share concerns for one particular guideline by filing a pull request or issue against that specific guideline. Similarly, it’s easier to see what’s already being considered for Guideline #12 (for example) by simply viewing the pull requests and issues for Guideline #12 before proposing your changes, rather than having to review the all of the proposals against everything.
Of course, once the collaboration is done, this will all be one single easy-to-read page. 🙂
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
That! ☝🏾
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jeffmcneill
Highly readable and understandable, looks like y’all have produced something worthy of all the effort involved. Thank you.
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Mike Schinkel
Ipstenu: Have you seen GitBook? It might be a good tool for this since its designed to make a bunch of .md files readable and collaborate on. They even offer free for open source. They even generate PDFs for those times when reading offline is a good thing.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
I had. Since the end goal will be to put this into WordPress, though, a temporary hassle of this is okay 🙂 If it lasts through October, I’ll be sad 🙂 I’m hoping enough of folks manage to bang it into better shape by end of September.
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jeffmcneill
GitBook is not bug-free, and sometimes* simpler is better (e.g., a set of .md files in Github).
*usually
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Maeve Lander
Nice job Mika, all looks clear and easy to understand.
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CodeBard
Clean, neat, understandable and simple. Also satisfactory is the tags conclusion – 12 tags are sufficient to categorize a plugin. And it wont create any additional development burden on behalf of repository development on your side. On our side we can use that sufficient number to properly classify our plugins into all relevant categories.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
It’s ALWAYS been 12. If we change the method of tag management in the new directory, then perhaps we’ll change the number. Personally I’d be happy if we just only showed 12 random tags of the ones in a readme.
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yeremyah
Hi Ipstenu, how can I message you to ask an important private question please?
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
If you have a plugin question, you email plugins@wordpress.org
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caramiame
great!
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Samuel Sidler
COMPLETED! Upcoming Maintenance Window for Plugins SVN
Hello plugin authors!
We will have a maintenance window for the plugins SVN repository from August 31, 20:30 UTC through September 01, 00:30 UTC (four hours total). During this time, plugin authors will not be able to commit to the SVN repository.
This post on the WordPress.org status page will be updated when the maintenance window is complete.
Edit: Maintenance has been completed, and the plugins SVN is available for commit once again.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
WordPress Plugin Directory
The WordPress Plugin Repository is rebranding as the WordPress Plugin Directory.
As “directory” refers to the entire plugin hosting service (the site, VCS, etc) and “repository” conventionally refers more specifically to just a VCS (such as GitHub, SVN, etc), we feel this will be less confusing and more in-line with the other aspects of WordPress.org.
We’re in the process of updating all our documentation.I believe I’ve updated all the documentation. Can I nap now?-
wpnoise
That’s really cool. Waiting for the documentations.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
It’s really just a one/word change. Though it took a couple hours to get all our pre-defined replies fix >.<
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Rami Yushuvaev
It’s not just a one word change. Terminology has a deep impact on products.
I think It’s a good change. No one really knows the difference between the “repo” and the “directory”. The change removes the confusion from the equation.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
The majority of the changes were literally one word. That’s all I meant. Of course the implications are farther reaching 🙂
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A WP Life
That’s such a great news. Waiting for that. 🙂
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Xavier Borderie
Makes perfect sense!
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Max Foundry
You’ve earned the nap! Enjoy.
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Nico
You refer to “VCS such as gitHUB and SVN”. Thats wrong! Github is a code hosting and collaboration platform and not “just a VCS”, remove the hub and its right.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
There are over 100 pages I touched to update documents here. Can you possible link to where these are and save us some headaches? Good bug reports for busted webpages need links, please and thank you.
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Nico
I do refer to this post here not anything else:
The WordPress Plugin Repository is rebranding as the WordPress Plugin Directory.
As “directory” refers to the entire plugin hosting service (the site, VCS, etc) and “repository” conventionally refers more specifically to just a VCS (such as GitHub, SVN, etc), we feel this will be less confusing and more in-line with the other aspects of WordPress.org.
I guess/hope you meant Git but you said Github. I do not like it when people confuse Git with Github because the 2 very different things. In other words what you said above between the lines was
Github is just as version control system (VCS)
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That of course is untrue. I think is unfortunate that people think of Github as if it IS Git.
A few facts to remember for those who don’t already know: The creator of Git, who is also the creator of the Linux kernel does not use Github. In fact Git was written for the Linux kernel maintenance and is used there since its creation without Github https://git.kernel.org/. Many other projects and companies host their own Git repositories and never touch Github. Github was created as a commercial enterprise by completely different people. This confusing leads to big business for Github and bad business for Bitbucket and others.
Of course thats not the real reason, even of it were all the same people, still Git is the VCS and Github is the hosing and collaboration platform that uses the software named Git. The core software they run Github on is even close source, shame on them! https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core-github-is-closed-source/
Github is not just a VCS for related reasons the WordPress Directory was never a WordPress Repository, they however never picked the wrong name 😉
Back to Topic, yes great, good decision!
And back to Git. i would love if you would allow Git in the Directory. I tried many scripts to automate the process of releasing my plugin from Github on the WordPress Directory but always came back to my own sledgehammer script that Otto would probably hate if he would see what its doing 😉 I basically just use the SVN like a SFTP dump to host the latest version.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Meh, then I really don’t care if I misspeak and look silly. I think most people will be fine and understand what I meant. As long as the official documentation isn’t messed up, it’s okay to make public mistakes 🙂 I’m human after all and I have too much else to worry about right now than a nitpick over that.
We won’t be going to GIT any time soon. We actually just updated SVN.
I basically just use the SVN like a SFTP dump to host the latest version.
That’s fine. The SVN repository here is a release repository, not a development one, anyway 🙂
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Facebook Changed Sharing Counts
Today, Facebook released version 2.7 of their API and changed the manner in which shared posts are counted.
That would have been okay, except they also turned off the part of the 1.0 API (the one that didn’t use versions in their URLs because who needed that?) and blindsided everyone. Reading the Facebook Dev Changelog didn’t make that any more sensible to me either. But what I can tell you is here are some affected plugins/services:
- Jetpack: https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/pull/4879
- Genesis Simple Share Buttons: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/facebook-share-counts-not-showing
- SharedCount: https://www.sharedcount.com/notes/facebook_api_shutdown.php
Anyone who has a plugin (or theme) with sharing buttons that count MAY be affected. If someone can come up with a way to scan the repository for impacted plugins, let me know and I’ll be happy to do that and email as many of them directly as we can.
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Shareaholic
We’re affected. It’s fixable and are working on a fix!
Shareaholic: https://wordpress.org/plugins/shareaholic/
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FolioVision
Thanks for the heads up Mika. We ran into this last week with our (private) Pretty Social plugin, trying to keep track of Facebook like counts. The solution is to use the 2.7 API instead. Keep in mind that 2.7 has a short lifespan already scheduled to be deprecated in turn in July 2018.
Moreover, the new API key has to be updated every two months!
It’s the Access Token in queried URLwhich has to be updated. The use must log in via Facebook and generate the token. We haven’t managed to automatize it yet.
For now, it works as follows: User must click on a notification link, which takes him to Facebook. Then s/he must authorize the app. At this point, Facebook should automatically generate long-access token via some query. Long access token expires in 60 days. We’ll be notifying admins in WP Admin a week or two before expirty to log in to Facebook to extend this token.
I hope this helps those who are relying on the Facebook API fix their plugins more quickly. One service has completely shut down, in face of the endless API restrictions.
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eleksie
I have the same problem with AccessPress social counter. None of the counts is showing on my site for all posts. Could you kindly elaborate further step by step on how I can update the Access Token?
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James Huff
This site is for coordination between the Plugins Team and plugin developers. Please continue via your support thread: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/social-counts-for-fcaebook-and-twitter-not-showing
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archon810
v1.0 hasn’t been available since April 30, 2015. What you’re thinking is v2.0 that got deprecated after plenty of announcements and several months lead time. Even though I got the notifications from Facebook, I procrastinated long enough for things to actually break when it was deprecated, but the fix was pretty easy: switch to using JSON values inside share->share_count.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
Nope. That’s what I thought too, but apparently the 1.0 urls were still working. So … It kind of is 1.0 still.
Look, do not ask me to explain Facebook and their insane APIs. I barely use it.
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Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Just for historical purposes, the Big Book of Faces has pulled this kind of stuff before. Moving forward I would urge anyone building plugins or themes relying on data from them to build in fallback features with the expectation that any service relied on can be pulled at any time without warning or proper error handling. This is not the first time this has happened, nor will it be the last.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
In general your code should have a fallback if the service is down.
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Rene Hermenau
We have the same problem for our MashShare plugin. One workaround could be the use of the still public available graph api endpoint: http://graph.facebook.com/?id=https://www.yoursite.com
I wrote something about this on our blog post:
https://www.mashshare.net/rest-api-is-deprecated-for-versions-v2-1-and-higher/Until now it seems to be working without any access token.
Doe anybody know if facebook is planning to make this endpoint available only for authenticated user?
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Rene Hermenau
Ignore my last comment. The endpoint is NOT public available. Only accessible with a access token.
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Jeremy Herve
We’ve just released Jetpack 4.2.2 to address this issue. Facebook’s sharing counts are back. 🎉
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nathanwells
Can you share your solution?
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Jeremy Herve
You can view the changes we’ve made in the Pull Request Mika shared in the post above:
https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/pull/4879-
nathanwells
Thanks. It looks like your solution combines Facebook shares and likes together rather than just shares (which in my case means there are more “shares” than views). Is there no longer any way to show just shares?
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Rene Hermenau
Hello Nathan, no there is no technical way around to get back the old share count. As i already wrote you in the ticket conversation jetpack is using the same api endpoint MashShare is also using because there is no other endpoint. Since latest API changes this number of shares is the only relevant number we get from FB. You can read here more about how this share number by facebook is calculated:
https://www.mashshare.net/facebook-calculate-share-count/After reading it you will understand better what this “new” number contains.
Cheers
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Daniel15
Version 1.0 of the API was deprecated way back in April 2015. I suspect you were actually using the REST API that was part of version 2.0. Version 2.1 (the replacement to 2.0) was released back in August 2014, and deprecated that old API. It’s been deprecated for two years, which should have been sufficient time to upgrade the code to use the new version.
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Daniel15
Also, ideally your API calls should all have a version number explicitly specified, rather than relying on the default version.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
That’s what I thought too, but _apparently_ the old 1.0 URLs were working for a long time on purpose. I know, right?
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JP
We have also already published an update for our one (Shariff Wrapper). It’s really just a simple change of the API request required. Seems a bit of an overkill to try to inform all possible affected plugin authors just for some share count issue. If they actively maintain their plugin, they will notice it easily and fix it soon after.
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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)
We don’t consider making sure devs are informed and users are patched to be overkill 🙂 We think of that as being considerate towards our community. Besides, if Jetpack was blindsided, and I know they’re Johnny on the Ball with this stuff, then it was not as clear as it could have been from FaceyBookey.
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Subharanjan
Even some of the themes which provides this feature of showing share counts are OFF !! Going to check and submit an issue or a pull request with fix now. Thanks for this post !!
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Dustin W. Stout
Hi Ipstenu! Just wanted to pop in and say THANK YOU for this! We had kind of caught wind of this but weren’t sure how it was going to affect our plugin. After it went into efffect, we made the necessary update to Social Warfare (https://wordpress.org/plugins/social-warfare/) and everything is working great! Really appreciate you letting the community know about this.
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gordon555
Found this in the response headers from http://graph.facebook.com/?id:
facebook-api-version →v2.1
Not sure if it has any actual meaning but v2.1 is going to be unavailable on October 2016.
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