Author Archives: Andrew Nacin

Andrew Nacin 7:48 pm on April 23, 2013  

Plugins SVN Repository DNS Change Today

In a short while (next 30 minutes or so), plugins.svn.wordpress.org will undergo a DNSDNS DNS is an acronym for Domain Name System - how you assign a human readable address to a website’s exact numeric coded location (ie. wordpress.org uses the actual IP address 198.143.164.252). change as part of a datacenter migrationMigration Moving the code, database and media files for a website site from one server to another. Most typically done when changing hosting companies.. The TTLs are low, so this should only take a few minutes.

Nothing will go down, but the SVNSVN Short for "SubVersioN", it's the code management system used to maintain the plugins hosted on WordPress.org. It's similar to git. repository will become temporarily read-only. If you try to commit code during this time, you’ll receive an maintenance message pointing you here. 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 pages and downloads will not be affected.

Also, the associated TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/. at plugins.trac.wordpress.org will be taken offline (for up to an hour) while it is migrated and re-synced.

Andrew Nacin 8:51 pm on May 19, 2012
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Plugin Directory Refreshed — What It Means for Developers

Matt just announced on the WordPress Blog — and many of you have already noticed — a number of recent changes to 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, profiles, and the support forums. Now let’s go into detail all of the individual changes, and what it means for plugin developers.

Design refresh for plugin pages.

We’re glad to see so many of you use the plugin headers we launched in December. Now, we’ve provided a further refresh. We’ve made authors much more prominent and with bigger Gravatars and better placement, and cleaned up the styles for the ratings, support, and compatibility sections. There’s a great before-after shot in the announcement post.

Support is now integrated into your plugin page.

In the past, creating new support topics for plugins has been special, and not in a particularly good way. It had this specialness by overloading the tags in the support forums to indicate that a thread was about a particular plugin. No longer. We’ve promoted plugins up a notch and given them their own area.

So now, on your plugin pages, you’ll see a “Support” menu in the headerHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes., and you’ll see the topics for that plugin in that tab. You’ll also find a submission form at the bottom of that tab, to add new support topics specifically for your plugin. Topics about plugins made from here get a special sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. with links to the plugin, to the plugin’s FAQ page, and to the list of Support Threads for that plugin.

While this section looks like it’s on the Plugin’s page, it’s not really. These support threads are actually in the same place they’ve always been, in the Support forums. What you’re seeing as far as the look and feel of that view of the support forums is just some clever trickery on our part. 🙂

Akismet, for example, will have it’s “support forums” at this URLURL A specific web address of a website or web page on the Internet, such as a website’s URL www.wordpress.org: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/akismet.

How to follow support threads for your plugins.

You may want to take advantage of this by subscribing to the RSS feedRSS Feed RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication which is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. This is the feed. for your plugin: https://wordpress.org/support/rss/plugin/akismet. Email subscriptions are not available for these yet, but we will be adding them this week.

For plugin authors who have been using them, the old convenience views of plugin-committers and plugin-contributors are still there as well. (Committers are managed in on the Admin tab, while contributors are taken from readme.txt.) We’ll be exposing these links in more places, but you can use them with URLs similar to the following: https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-committer/Otto42 https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-contributor/Otto42. (RSS feeds exist for these as well.)

Support statistics are now shown to users.

You’ll notice a new area on the plugin page sidebar showing information about how many topics there are for your plugin, and how many of them have been marked as resolved. These are handy for users to see if questions are likely to get a response.

You have had the ability to mark plugin support threads as resolved for some time now. It’s now really easy — you can mark a thread as resolved while making a post with a simple checkbox. Note that the user who opened the thread can also mark threads as resolved and unresolved. Threads that are marked “Not a support question,” such as suggestions or feedback, are not counted toward these stats and do not need to be marked resolved.

Statistics will be based on a rolling two-month period, based on when the thread was opened. Currently, the statistics cover threads opened in the last two weeks, and will continue to increase until it reaches two months, to allow you some time to resolve existing threads.

Managing your forum with sticky topics.

You can now make threads “sticky”  threads to the top of your plugin’s support forumSupport Forum WordPress Support Forums is a place to go for help and conversations around using WordPress. Also the place to go to report issues that are caused by errors with the WordPress code and implementations., just like the other forums on 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/. (You’ll find a link “Stick topic to this plugin’s support forum” in the sidebar.) Threads marked as sticky will show at the top of your plugin’s Support tab. (They won’t be sticky on the regular forums.) We hope you find this handy for posting FAQs or other important information about your plugin.

A new section for developers.

Every plugin now has a Developers tab where you can find links for browsing the code in Subversion, the development log, and development versions. Here, you can now subscribe to get an email whenever a commit is made to a plugin repository, even if it isn’t yours. (You will of course continue to receive commits for your own plugins.)

Favoriting plugins.

As I’m sure you’ve now seen, plugins can now be favorited by logged-in users — and have been more than 2,000 times since we soft-launched this feature earlier in the week! When you favorite a plugin, it gets added to your profile. And if you’ve also rated that plugin, your rating gets shown.

We expect to do a lot more with all of this in the future — favorites, plugins, support, and profiles. Until next time, we hope you enjoy these changes as much as we do!

— written by Nacin, Otto, and Scott

#directory, #support

Andrew Nacin 5:21 am on May 11, 2012
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The WordPress trademark and domain names

A friendly reminder to 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 authors: Per the WordPress trademark policy, do not use “wordpress” in your domain name. We have been actively notifying developers that reference such domains in readme files or plugin headers. If you are violating the trademark, please update your plugins. Your next step should be to switch to another domain.

As our page on wordpress.org says, “We see this most frequently with spammy sites distributing plugins and themes with malware in them, which you probably don’t want to be associated with.”

#trademarks

Andrew Nacin 5:06 am on May 11, 2012
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Plugin licensing: GPLv3 is now accepted

Cross-posted from the main development blog:

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’s licensing guidelines have been updated. The guidelines will now allow code that is licensed under (or compatible with) version 3 of the GPLGPL GPL is an acronym for GNU Public License. It is the standard license WordPress uses for Open Source licensing https://wordpress.org/about/license/. The GPL is a ‘copyleft’ license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/copyleft.en.html. This means that derivative work can only be distributed under the same license terms. This is in distinction to permissive free software licenses, of which the BSD license and the MIT License are widely used examples..

The guidelines still encourage use of “GPLv2 or later,” the same license as WordPress. However, we understand that many 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. libraries use other licenses that are nonetheless compatible, such as GPLv2 only, GPLv3, and ApacheApache Apache is the most widely used web server software. Developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation. Apache is an Open Source software available for free. 2.0.

Now may be a good time for plugin authors to review their plugins to ensure a license is specified. You can add License and License URI headers to readme.txt and the plugin’s headers. (You may also wish to include a copying permission statement.) For example:

License: GPLv2 or later
License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html

You can see this used in the sample readme.txt.

This change brings the guidelines in line with the themes directory, which has for some time accepted GPLv3-compatible code. (Probably a good time to note that Creative Commons licenses are still incompatible with the GPL, and the theme and plugin directories.)

#licensing