WordPress.org Plugin Profile Pages

 

The plugin profile pages on WordPress.org are full of helpful and interesting information. Let’s take a look at what’s in there and how it can help you

Transcription

Hey folks! Welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week. This week, we’re going to take a look at the plugin pages on wordpress.org. I want to show you kind of everything that’s there. We’re going to do a full survey because there might be some things that surprise you. I’m here on wordpress.org, we’re going to go to ‘plugins’. You can see there are groups of them. Here’s some block-enabled plugins, some featured plugins, some beta plugins. These are my personal favorites. There are some popular ones. And then at the top, you can click to community, commercial, etc. 

So I’m going to use three different plugins to show you kind of everything that can go on a plugin page. This one is called Add Admin CSS, and it is for shoehorning some CSS into your admin area to do some things that you want to do, like maybe hide all notices or something like that. 

Right at the top—we’re gonna start with the header here—you’ll see there’s this great big banner. Plugins can have a banner or they can choose not to. It’s up to the plugin developer. And it’s largely a marketing piece. 

Next, you see this notice on the Add Admin CSS. It hasn’t been updated or tested with the latest three major releases of WordPress. This is not an inherently scary thing, especially if I know who built it. I know Scott, and he keeps his stuff up to date if it needs it. So just because it hasn’t been tested doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work. You’ll see over here on the Akismet one, the feature or the announcement is not there and nor is it here. I’ll show you where you can see when it was last updated in a minute. 

Then we have an icon. Let’s check with the icon first, because it also is voluntary. You’ll see Akismet has one here. But this one just has a pattern. And if there’s no icon specified, then a pattern is magically generated for it. So you’ll see this icon in your own WordPress install when you go to install this plugin if you choose to do that.

Next is the title, of course, and then the author. The author’s name links directly to their website. Well, it links to wherever the author determines. So in the case of Dilip here, it goes to his WordPress profile. 

On the right, you’ll see there’s a little heart. If you mouse over it, it beats. This is where you can favorite plugins. I haven’t favorited this one, nor this one, but I have this one. If you have that it will be red. Favorited plugins can be accessed from within your own WordPress install, so you don’t have to go out hunting for them, or even remember their name like I often fail to do. And then there’s a download button. You can just download the zip file if you want to. 

So now let’s move down into the main content area. We’re going to start. Right here there’s a row of tabs: details, reviews, installation and development. And over here on the right, there’s support. So let’s look at details first. There’s a description, and there could be a variety of things in this description. In this case, we have a code block that shows you how you can use it in code if you want. We also have one screenshot. So there’s a thumbnail, but there’s no scroll bars to see it. 

And then there can optionally be a Frequently Asked Questions area. And they just opened up like this. At the bottom, it tells you who wrote this plugin. There’s Scott Riley, and this one links to his profile. Let’s see what it leads to up here. See this one links to his personal homepage. So this link is much more customizable. 

Now, let’s look at Akismet real quick and their description. They have no code, they have no screenshots, but they have a much longer list of contributors and developers. There’s Matt Mullenweg, there’s Automattic, there’s Owen, Christopher, etc. 

And then over here we have, again, one developer. This time he has multiple screenshots and you can scroll through them. It also has a small frequently asked question thing, and oh, it is a… there are two developers. There’s two Jigar Bhanushali. That’s the details. 

If you go to reviews, you can see the reviews in an attractive way. And I’ll explain what that means in a few minutes. So let’s bring up the reviews in the other ones. They all look pretty much the same. We will look at different view for reviews in just a second. 

Next, we go to installation. This tab disappoints me the most because it always says, how to manually upload your plugin via FTP and things like that. And the real answer is you go into WordPress to search for it and click “install”. But I don’t know why sites don’t update that. See, this one says, “Upload the Akismet plugin to your blog. Activate it.” They don’t even say you have to search. This one is exactly the way I think it should be. “Go to the admin panel, go to plugins, add new, search for it, install and activate it.” That’s perfect. 

But now let’s look at the development tab because that’s really interesting. So contributors and developers. It tells you that this one has been translated into three locales, and then you can click to see who the translators were. And then there’s a link to translate it into your own language. If you’re interested in development, you can browse the code this way. Let me make that a whole lot bigger. You can browse the code this way. Let’s open it up. There’s trunk and there’s the code. Oh, you have to download it here. 

You can check out the SVN repository, which is going to have the same code. But it’s just an HTML list. Looking at directly at SVN. You can subscribe to the development log, which will tell you all the changes. This one gets updates every few years. So it’s not going to be a whole lot of traffic. Other plugin, you get a ton. You can subscribe via email or RSS. Or you can just read the changelog right here. It tells you when it was updated. And all that kind of stuff. 

Go look at another one. There’s development. There’s the translators list again, browse the code, subscribe, etc. Here’s a link to the older changelog entries. And then, under “development” here, there’s the changes log. Now still across the top here, there’s the “support” tab on the right. Now, this is an open forum—anybody can post here, the author, users, whatever. And the author is not required to answer questions here. So you may or may not get good support here. That depends entirely upon the author of the plugin. 

So let’s go back. Now we’re going to look at what’s in the right column here, because there’s some pretty important things. Right at the top, it says what version is latest. When it was last updated? 11 months ago. That’s not too bad. 900+ active installations. Whether that’s a lot or not, is completely relative. 

For example, if we come over here to Akismet, they have plus 5 million and Add Admin CSS, 10,000. If I wrote a plugin by myself, I would be delighted to have 900 plus. I think the highest I have installed is like 40. This tells you the latest WordPress version that works in which makes sense. This is a Gutenberg plugin and 5.0 was when Gutenberg was brought out. It set up to 6.0.5. 6.2 is the latest I believe. PHP version, 5.6.3 or higher so you know it works. It’s backwards compatible as far as WordPress.

Languages see all four. Let’s see. Oh, it opened right up. English, French, Japanese, and Russian. And here are some tags that help you search. If you’re searching the site, you can search for these things and find it. 

Now, there’s an advanced view here that I want to show you that is kind of important. It’s kind of a big deal. Active versions. So you can see there’s still a few installs for 2.2 out there, and then 2.3, but most everybody’s updated. And here’s downloads per day. All these relate either to the weekend or release days. 34, 33, so about 30 a day. 

Downloads history, today, there were 11. Yesterday, there were 23. In the last seven days, 79. All time, 11,000 downloads. So that’s interesting. There are currently 900+ installations. So about 2,000 have just deleted it.

Advanced options. This section is intended for advanced users and developers only. There’s nothing on this plugin, so it doesn’t matter. We’ll look at the other plugins for that. But this is an important thing. This is where you can download previous versions of the plugin. So if you accidentally upload update and think, oh, no, I need to go back, right, here’s where you can do it. And that’s under the Advance tag, or link in the right sidebar. 

So let’s go back one. Oh, you know what? I was gonna look at advance under Akismet. And they have nothing also, which doesn’t surprise me. There aren’t very many plugins with advanced things only. 

But here’s ratings. Now you remember, we looked at reviews. Reviews are made up of ratings. So you can click to see all. And these are the same things that we saw under the reviews link. They’re just in a forum based because that’s how they’re entered. They’re just forum posts, and you can put in stars. If you’re logged in, you can add your own. And you can see that right here also. 

Then there’s the contributors’ list, which is very long for Akistmet. It’s quite short for Scott. The support thing here shows issues resolved in the last few months. So it would appear Scott does not do support through this. And that’s fine. Akismet has resolved three out of four. And the frequently asked questions one is, again, done zero out of one. 

So there’s two ways to look at this. One is that they don’t do the support very much. The other is that they don’t need support very much. There aren’t very many questions. And then you can view the support forum here, which is same as that tab in the top right. 

So now we’ve covered everything. In my opinion, some of the most important things are under advanced view at the bottom, being able to download past versions, being able to look at past code, etc. And as a developer, I love the development tab and being able to look at the repository and see how it’s built. If you’re a translator, this is a great place to look for plugins that need it.

So now you know the details of a wordpress.org plugins profile. I hope you find it useful.