With over 50,000 free plugins, the WordPress plugin directory is the city’s shopping mall for every WordPress user, where you’ll find plugins covering every feature and functionality for your next website. However, you probably won’t find a plugin with the exact features expressly required by the client. Like it or not, you might have to fire up your favorite text editor and start coding. But have you ever considered sharing your plugins with the entire WordPress community?
The main purpose of this post is to discuss with you, the readers, the advantages of distributing plugins through the WordPress.org repository. I’ll quickly summarize the recommendations and best practices that are recommended to follow, then walk you through the key SVN concepts that you should know when you’re planning to publish a plugin to the WordPress plugin directory .
Why the WordPress Plugin Directory?
The first reason to publish your plugin to the WordPress plugin directory is to take advantage of a large number of free tools and services, such usa email list as plugin description, statistics, active installations, changelog, support forum, and much more. Additionally, users are notified when a new version is available and can run the update directly from the WordPress plugins screen. WordPress.org plugins have higher visibility in search engines , and you can exploit a powerful means to promote your identity and enhance your reputation as a developer.
If you’re not a big marketer or don’t have the time to market, the WordPress plugin directory can be a great way to get free traffic and attract more attention to your plugin .
Another great reason to publish a plugin is to contribute to the WordPress community. WordPress is free software, with a huge community providing tons of themes and plugins for free. Publishing a WordPress plugin is the best way to say thank you to all these amazing people who give away their work for free.
What You Should Be Worried About
Keep in mind that increased visibility could ruin your reputation if your plugins are poorly coded, if you don’t update them regularly, or if you don’t provide fast and effective support (certainly if you don’t act like a trusted developer). Here are some key concepts to aim for.
Coding
There’s a lot to say about coding, and you’ll find plenty of useful reading out there. But if you’re a WordPress developer, the Codex is your Bible, and you should read the Plugin Guidelines before you start coding. Here’s my personal list of key concepts:
- Keep your code human-readable . This helpful employee benefits allows other developers to understand what your plugin does, possibly helping you find bugs and develop their own plugins around your code. In order to foster collaboration between developers, the WordPress Codex sets out the WordPress coding standards , which WordPress Plugin Directory is a summation of best practices for any WordPress developer.
- Always comment your code . Online documentation is a great resource that should never be underestimated. It allows anyone to quickly understand what a function does, what arguments are accepted, what returns are returned, etc. In comments, you can add links, script versions, and other descriptions that burkina faso business directory can come in handy anytime your script is going to be edited by you or anyone else.
And I’d like to say that the WordPress folks are a learning community, and respecting online documentation standards is a great way for people to learn what you already know. - Prefer WordPress functions over PHP functions whenever possible . WordPress functions allow you to generate efficient and secure code. Especially when you need to get data from the database, the API functions prevent you from building complex queries, which would most likely be less secure than WordPress’ built-in queries. There are a ton of developers behind the core, and they are doing fantastic work that we can take advantage of.
