Plugins/themes categorization

After State of the WordState of the Word This is the annual report given by Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress at WordCamp US. It looks at what we’ve done, what we’re doing, and the future of WordPress. https://wordpress.tv/tag/state-of-the-word/., you may have noticed a couple new things for plugins and themes.

This is the start of a broader categorization of plugins and themes. The eventual goal of which is to help users to better find plugins or themes that fit their needs.

Categories

So we started looking at basic categories for plugins and themes, and how we would integrate that into wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/.

One thing we noticed immediately was that there are a lot of commercial plugins and themes. They’re not the majority, but there are a lot of them that have a lot of users.

The other thing we noticed was there were a lot of community based plugins and themes, which are open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. on GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ or some other repository system.

In both cases, it became very clear that we didn’t have any easy way to link back to those systems. We have support forums for all of the plugins, but we often get questions about the commercial version of a 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. Similarly, we don’t have any obvious way to link back to a github, for example, to provide users a way to contribute to that community.

So we introduced a new taxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. to our systems, and now plugins and theme authors can opt into it, if they want.

How to opt-in

To opt in a plugin or theme, email plugins@wordpress.org, or themes@wordpress.org, and simply ask to opt into it. This is a manual process for now. In the future, we will be adding a method for plugins and themes to do it themselves.

Once your plugin or theme is added, you will get a new feature (on the advanced tab for plugins, or at the bottom of the listing page for themes). For both cases, it’s a simple URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org entry.

For commercial, this will show up as a support link. For community, this will show up as a contribute link.

More to come…

And, of course, this is in no way final. We plan to use this and other categories in the future to improve the overall directory system as a whole. In what ways, we don’t exactly know just yet. We value your input, and look forward to seeing what ideas the community has. 🙂

#plugins, #themes