- This topic has 6 replies, 7 voices, and was last updated 9 years, 6 months ago by
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Daniel Bachhuber:
Because I don’t see it on the list, and not because I necessarily want to open up the can of worms: what to do about the plugins directory.
For those of us using “plugins” as components to larger sites, the quality of the plugin is paramount. Quality could be defined as health of development, extensibility, compatibility, etc. Choosing a bad plugin can break a project.
One could argue the current plugins directory is oriented towards users, and we could use one oriented towards developers. Yes, I’m aware of the stereotypes I’m perpetuating.
Jeremy Felt:
+1
I’d love to have something in place where I could see what other developers are using a plugin, code reviews with enterprise in mind, whether it makes proper use of caching APIs, and how it handles security. Etc.. etc… etc…
Anything to reduce the amount of effort required to start to trust a plugin in an enterprise environment.
Weston Ruter:
+100
I was just talking with Bryan Petty (tierra) about this. He’s the developer behind Plugin Mirror, which does an SVN sync of the .org plugins to GitHub for read-only forking.
I’d love for the WordPress.org plugin directory to start including scores from automated tests, for instance PHP_CodeSniffer WordPress Coding Standards, JSHint, YUI Compressor check, and any other static analysis tools. Then to take it a step higher, to actually activate a plugin on a vanilla WordPress site and see what kind of footprint it has, namely whether database tables get created and whether errors/warnings/notices get generated. Just knowing the latter, whether there are PHP notices, would be a huge indicator in terms of knowing the level of quality for a plugin.
These automated checks would tie in well with manual code reviews by enterprise agencies/developers. Plugin reviews written by developers with more WP “clout” should get ranked higher in the overall plugin rating.
In addition to scores, the WordPress.org directory needs to make it easier for people to contribute and to keep plugins from languishing. I had an idea about how to leverage the Plugin Mirror on GitHub for this, if nothing was to be done on WordPress.org itself: the Plugin Mirror could have its own WordPress.org account, and plugin authors could add this user to their plugins as a committer. If the Plugin Mirror then started taking pull requests, the author could then merge them on GitHub and Plugin Mirror could push them to the WordPress.org SVN repo. This would allow people to open pull requests on .org plugins and have a straightforward path for contributing.
I suppose .org wouldn’t want to marry to close with GitHub, even if it is the de-facto platform for open source software platform nowadays, so the specific external Git repo used by a plugin could be configurable: GitHub, BitBucket, Google Code, etc.
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