If users aren’t paying attention, they’ll wind up with two versions of the same plugin on their sites. And it’s more than likely that they’ll assume that the plugin is updated and activated once they’ve uploaded it to their servers. But in reality, the old version will be the active plugin and the newer version is not activated yet.

Personally, I think unofficial is the way to go.

anyeay, I disagree with one part. every plugin I have ever seen, gets put in domain.com/wp-content/plugins I’ve yet to see a plugin that doesn’t get put there, so that part alone should be a standard.

I do agree about where plugin authors make us “hunt down” where in the admin area to find their admin panel. Sometimes its in Options, I’ve seen it in plugins before, I’ve seen it in presentation before. I mean, I agree they should standardize that so that authors are forced to put it in a certain place, so we as users aren’t looking for a needle in a haystack, esp when you got 500 plugins installed, I immagine its hard to find stuff with 500 of ‘em. I have 20 and have a hard enough time.. =P

one final pet pieve I have about WP. I downright HATE it when plugins modify my dashboard, so authors, PLEASE don’t do that, don’t mess with the dashboard please. and for wordpress blog software itself, it does me no good to say “version blabla is available, go here to download” that annoys me to no end. I KNOW where wordpress is located. If your gonna tell us a new version is available, work it into wordpress to automatically upgrade. subversion SUCKS, and upgrading via unzipping and FTP’ing has messy results, and due to security reasons in this day and age for some strange reason, most webhosts don’t allow SSH access anymore, so we CAN’T run subversion even if we wanted to.. so my suggestion? do what forum software does and work it into the admin area to download and install right from the admin area. I know it can be done because Simple Machines does it just using simple PHP, so I know wordpress can figure out a way. That would help so much its not even funny. even if you had to type in your FTP info and all that, that would help SO many of us.

BUT a nice follow up could be a more modern look at plugin coding and distribution especially since WordPress extend does help with some of the issues mentioned here. WordPress has changed so much in the past year and I see many plugins that could use a minor tweak here or there ( like using wp_enqueue_script() instead of mucking up *_head() ).. of course it looks like the upcoming 2.5 is already making me look at some serious redevelopment efforts. Looks like this will be a “working” summer.

My suggestion that we get a plugin standard together is the same one I’d make about theme design: Professionalism. Blogging is whatever you want it to be. ‘Should’ the WordPress framework and its dependents be professional?

The only comments here with which I disagree say, in sum: Well, it’s free so you get what you get. No. I’d pay five to ten dollars for a good plugin—and have. There are some plugins that are developed to the point of being applications in their own right (Simpleforum, RS-Discuss, KB-Gradebook, GigPress, and a handful of others), and are worth a few dollars more. The only question is: How would we do that? A desktop application can have a trial timeout. Can we do that with a plugin? Could more of us voluntarily afford five dollars? It just doesn’t seem like much to ask, yet, as one commentor points out, we’re not thinking about doing it. Maybe the problem is that so much is free, we don’t think about a voluntary donation—a donation/payment that would lead to professionalism.

A plugin available via the wordpress.org repository could have, say, a WP Good Housekeeping seal of approval. I don’t know if we can ever shed plugin conflicts but if the plugin runs well standalone and has user-friendly instructions, it’s a Good Housekeeper. If the author met reasonable operating standards, they get to put a certified logo on their plugin page.

Just a thought.

PS: I did visit all your sites; very interesting. And if you’d like a list of all the plugins I tested and the results, you can write me at: imustneedglasses@yahoo.com

Thanks a lot for this extremely useful information. I am quite new in wordpress plugin development. When I started trying to find out about how to write a simple wordpress plugin and things like that, I struggled a lot in the beginning to find information, now though things have changed.

I have made a small plugin of my own too, that comes in quite handy for me, it is basically a widget wherein I can put any html code I want to and it will then be accessible to me as a widget and I can place it wherever I want to in my blog.

If I ever release any plugins, that I think can come in useful for others, I will surely keep your suggestions in mind while doing so.

So they go about installing and playing with it, thinking they can figure it out along the way. When thing breaks, first thing to do, go to the author’s website and shout for help!

Manual? What manual?! You provide the plugin, you must support the plugin (and me the user).

End of rant…

Um … a paying market would help enforce & reward plugins standards!

The only reason I released my Dale Reckoning plugin was because I rewrote the date and calendaring functions for a non-standard calendar and I thought that others who wanted to do the same might benefit from my work.

But, whatever, it’ll still be fun, for me, to mess around with my code.

1) Plugins are mostly written by amateur coders. Many of them write this code once, test it once with whatever version they were running at the time, and they don’t do anything beyond that. There are tons of abandoned projects out there, stuck in version 1.x because the code graduated from school / got a job / lost interest

2) Most people by nature don’t consider the idea of future versions. So “tested in version 2″ is correct, but only at the time of publication. Any true list of plugins would require the author to come back from time to time and “touch” the compatiblity and tested with versions. If the author has lost interest or the code is no longer maintained, it will slip to the bottom of the list and show not checked or compatible with current versions.

3) Wordpress lacks a true API, so many plugins are in fact minor to major hacks of the code. Without a true API, almost all plugins will break as version move on.

So for me, I would think it would be high time for wordpress (version 3 maybe) to change the entire plugin structure to use a true API that would react the same version to version to version, which in turn would make plugins both more reliable and more durable. Until then, every minor or major upgrade is going to break a percentage of all plugins.