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I have to admit, I love WordPress Extend Plugins. My first experience with the service came in April of this year when I released Ajax Edit Comments. I was mainly drawn to the service because of the promise of added publicity and the ease of tracking statistics.

My plugin crossing the 10,000 mark is a testament in itself to how WP Extend (and the WP community) helps promote plugins.

Once you get used to it, WP Extend is an easy and powerful tool for launching (and maintaining) a plugin. Sure the SVN takes a little bit of getting used to, but numerous people have written great tutorials on how to get your plugin listed (Windows, Linux, Mac?).

And since WordPress 2.3, WordPress users are automatically notified when a plugin listed at WP Extend is updated. It can’t get any better than that. Or, can it?

I love you WP Extend Plugins, but I have several suggestions on how to make the service even more enjoyable.

Featured Plugins? Forever?

As much as I love you WP Extend, forever is not in my vocabulary. I can’t remember the last time I saw the featured plugins change. I think there’s some room to shake things up a bit and feature something new from time to time.

I know being listed in the featured section doesn’t guarantee more downloads, but a change in scenery would help keep things fresh.

Please Give the Newer Plugins a Chance for Most Popular

Plugins such as Sidebar Widgets, Google Sitemaps, or Akismet have been around for a while. Could the newer kids on the block have a shot at this popularity contest?

How about showing popularity relative to points in time, such as monthly?

How About Related Plugins?

Another suggestion I have is to show related plugins in addition to the awesome feature of showing what else was downloaded.

For example, for All in One SEO Pack, you can see the other plugins that were downloaded in addition to the SEO plugin. However, looking at the list reveals no related plugins.

In the case of SEO Pack, I think it would be great to see other SEO related plugins as well.

Could I Please Have Sort Options Within Tags?

The post tag currently has the most plugins for any tag. Right now it’s being sorted by most recently updated, which is fine. But I see growing pains as tags become more populated. It would be awesome if there was a sort option for most popular, most highly rated, and perhaps alphabetic.

Since the “most highly rated” suggestion can easily be gamed, I suggest the date of addition, ratings, and downloads be placed into an algorithm that determines the highest rated plugins.

Can I Please Change My Plugin’s Homepage URL?

I’ve run into a situation where my plugin’s homepage changed. I unfortunately cannot change this, not even in the coveted readme file. Could I please have an option in the readme file to specify my plugin’s homepage URL?

And Recommendations for Plugin Authors

WordPress Extend Plugins is a great tool, but only if you use it to its maximum potential. If you happen to have a FAQ, screenshots, installation instructions, or other information, please have this all listed on WP Extend instead of having a link directing users back to another website.

If you take the time to post the screenshots, FAQ, and other information on WP Extend, you’ll get more downloads. I promise. You’ll still get a lot of website traffic, especially if your users need help.

WP Extend Plugins should ideally be self-sustaining, so please make it more convenient for those browsing the directory and have as much information listed as possible so the user can make an educated download decision.

Conclusion

Matt and his Automattic team have done wonders with WP Extend. It’s helped plugins authors like me list their plugins with ease.

Please take my suggestions with a grain of salt as they come solely from my observations over the past year. If WP Extend Plugins implements just one of my suggestions, I will fall over myself in bliss.

If you are a user of WP Extend (plugin author or plugin seeker), please feel free to weigh in on my suggestions and perhaps add some of your own.

404 Error Log allows the blog administrator to track 404 pages error generated by the blog, and save the reports into an HTML file or send it through email. (English download)

Local Analytics is a Wordpress plugin for integrating Google Analytics, the free web analysis service by Google, into your WordPress powered blog.

TabStat allows you to monitor the status of and optimize your database tables.

I receive requests from readers about plugins or modifications for Wordpress that they could use on their own blogs. I have been able to find them existing plugins in the past but I also write about them so plugin authors can get a chance to know what their audience is looking for or if I cannot find a suitable solution through my grapevine. I had a few questions this week that I could not find appropriate answers for. If you have other questions, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list. In the future, if you have questions on products, plugins or themes you are looking for and cannot find, please Contact us through the contact form or send me an email and I will try to find it for you or accumulate them for a post like this. If you have an answer for these questions or would like to help develop a plugin or a hack for it, please let us know.

Regular reader Michelle asks:

I’ve been looking around for a plugin that would allow me to do A/B testing on my clients’ sites. By that I mean something would would allow me to set up a “campaign” where one thing would change (on a page or across the site) and I’d be able to get results showing which faired better. For example, say I’d like to test the wording of a headline and I have 2 or 3 different versions. I’d like to be able to set something up where I could enter in the different options, then WordPress would automatically randomly serve up the different headings to people visiting the site. I could then measure traffic on that page or clicks on a particular link etc. These are common things that marketers like to do: test things on a page, or even different versions of a page. It would need to be pretty broad, allowing for randomization at different levels of content, eg entire pages/posts, blocks of text within a page/post or across the entire site, images, links, form buttons, even themes. I know it’s a big ask, but being able to test these kinds of things without getting your hands too dirty in templates would be great.

Also, Matthew asks the following:

Conduit allows a menu to be created which can pull from an XML file on the server. Well what if there was a plugin for WordPress that could dynamically generate the XML file, say adding WordPress pages or whatever from the blog? Maybe even links to the archives or whatever.
Don’t know if it’s even possible.

Finally Ricardo asked me for the following:

is there any plugin availiable that showcases WP-Themes in a single WP-Page? I mean something like… on the left side a preview screenshot, on the right side a small description with a preview link and the download link.

Do you know of any existing plugins that would accomplish the tasks for them? Are you in the process of developing something that works? Would you have use for the plugins(s) if they were developed?

This week I received a request for a plugin that would allow upload of files from a Wordpress blog without requiring a user login. Ideally the plugin would send an email to the administrator of the blog when a file is uploaded, would allow the user to add some meta to the file being uploaded and the file upload location would be configurable. Some of the functionality already exists in the Secure Files Plugin

There has also been a request for a plugin that enables EXIF functionality in Wordpress, gathers the information from uploaded files, stuffs the EXIF information in meta for the post and then displays them as custom fields or when you hover over the image. Some of this functionality already exists in photo plugins and modifications but a simple and seamless plugin would be nice.

If you would like your need or idea for Wordpress functionality to be pitched here, please Leave us a Message

This is a new series of weekly posts that will highlight requests that are sent to us from users looking for a certain tool or functionality. In many cases the tools are either just not there, someone has not thought of it yet, not possible to acheive or the solution has been completely overlooked by us. This would a good place for suggestions, links, directions and offers of help. I will not post the requesters contact information unless expressly asked to do so. If you have asked us for help and see your request in the list, please check back this post or subscribe to the comments. If you need help or have a request or a question that you would like added, please use the Contact Form in the top menu or email one of the authors of this blog. There will be a single WP WishList post per week and only if there are enough requests in the week.

Disclaimer: This is meant for those that have tried to find a solution, posted on the Wordpress Support Forums, searched the web and have still not found the solution they were looking for. If the answer is blatant and can be easily searched and found, you might find your requests ignored. This is not meant for help or support of existing tools, nor is it aimed towards paid development or support. This is mostly an idea generation tool for Wordpress developers who are looking to write new plugins, widgets, tools and hacks and for the community to use in case they are sorely missing a feature/plugin/widget they would love to have.

This weeks requests for ideas include:

• A Sidebar Archives plugin or widget that reduces the use of vertical space, displays somewhat detailed, intuitive and useful archive links and is not very load intensive. Fancy Archives have been tested and load proved to be an issue for this user.
• The ability to include pages in reverse chronological order along with regular posts in the feed of a blog. A plugin would be fantastic, a hacked feed generator could also be nice. Note: this is not about generating a feed for a single page but including pages in the regular Wordpress feed along with regular posts.