Concept: A Developer Dashboard

One of the ideas that came from WCEU was a centralized dashboard for 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 developers. A place they could go to see all their plugins, and the current status on these plugins. What follows is concept art of what that kind of dashboard may look like.

This is something I dreamed up in Nacin’s talk about the government. This idea has no code backing behind it.

So why am I posting it? I’d like to hear people’s thoughts on this. What do you think would work or won’t work? Too much automation or not enough? Do you actually already HAVE this code written and want to share? Here is a zip of the Balsamiq Mockup: WP-Developer-Dashboard.bmpr_.zip – You know the drill. Edits welcome!

Concept Art

Goals

  • Make a centralized location for developers to manage their plugins

That’s really it. Making this public means a question of moving the ‘advanced’ tab to this page, and would it be duplicating data unnecessarily? In a way, it would move the developer page here as well, leaving only that which is controlled by the readme left on the readme. But then again, jumping between urls could be a mess. I don’t know. That’s why it’s a concept.

Also it should be easier for a developer to contact the plugin team when they have issues. And yes, the communication would be public, unless a comment is flagged as ‘security.’ Again, no code at all exists to make this a reality.

What’s Missing

There’s no contact form for a closed plugin. There should be. But this is really just concept art and starting to get an idea of what may work.

There’s also a dearth of data on the main dashboard page. That could lift from plugins like WP Dev Dashboard or WP Developers Homepage to fill in data. That’s the same general concept of what we’d want on the Support page (which you’ll notice is also left missing).

Misc. Thoughts

One of the stated goals we have is to allow everyone to leave a review on a plugin, with regards to the reviews before approval. In doing so, those reviews and all discussions about a plugin would need to be public. This is not necessarily a bad thing, though it will lead to some developers thinking long and hard about how they address issues in public. My concerns are that people who continually make the same error or neglect to fix something will be publicly embarrassed, but also that a free-for-all with reviews would lead to developers not wanting to host code here due to public backlash.

However, it’s been pointed out to me that coddling developers as much as we do may be causing them more harm in the long run. We do spend an inordinate amount of time hand-holding people who don’t want to take the time to read and think through a debugging process. Certainly we don’t mind helping out people who are brand new, or who aren’t native English speakers. But they’re vastly the minority of people who act the goat in our emails. And generally, they’re very respectful and nice.

Right now, my gut feeling is that there should still be a private way to talk about security issues.

But behavioural ones? They can be handled in public. It may stop people from some of the name-calling.