Attention All Plugin Authors

Jeff Chandler — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 11:49:20 +0000

Today is the day of changelogs for plugins in the WordPress plugin repository. Back on June 15th, I vented about the fact that most Plugins didn’t provide an easily accessible changlog that notified me of why I should upgrade to the latest version of their plugin. Some plugins provided this information in the description tab while others placed it within the Other Notes link. Still others linked directly to a blog post explaining what had changed. The end user experience of trying to figure out why a plugin should be upgraded was a nightmare which is why I proposed that a new top level link be added along side Installation, Other Notes, etc called Changelog which provides a short and sweet history of version numbers and changes. This idea had been proposed before but no one managed to find time to address it.

Thanks to some great work by Peter Westwood and Mdawaffe, the example Readme.txt file which is used by all plugin authors to manage their plugins now has an example of the changelog in action. In fact, if you’d like to know how to implement this right away for your plugin, please read this blog post by Peter Westwood as it clearly illustrates how easy it is to add.

I encourage every single one of you plugin authors out there to add a changelog to your plugin. As an end user, I want to know up front and center why I should upgrade to the latest version without having to search the web for a blog post regarding the release. I think this is a change that benefits everyone.

If you’re an end user, please chime in and let me know if you think this information is important enough to deserve its own link on the plugin information page.

Weblog Tools Collection » changelog

Attention All Plugin Authors