WordPress Plugin Directory

Last week it was announced that there’s a new shiny WordPress Plugins Directory. There’s always been a developer focused site there, but for end users it just wasn’t all that great or friendly. This should really help WordPress users find and locate plugins now. Assuming developers are willing to migrate to it, of course.

It’s still a bit rough around the edges though — in particular, the tagging is just plain goofy. In theory, each plugin has some tags associated with it. Over time, a tag cloud is built to help people find plugins. Either that’s horribly broke or people have figured out how to game it a bit.

For instance, the top tag is “skype button” and there are supposedly 37 occurrences for it. Click it and you’ll see one plugin. Hmm… that’s messed up. I hope it is something that can be addressed soon. The actual tag cloud page looks positively silly in light of stuff like that.

[Updated:  The appears to be resolved.  Excellent]

Oh, and you can get feeds from the tag views, but not an overall feed. An overall feed would be nice to see what’s new in the plugin world. An odd oversight?

All whining aside, I think it’s a pretty great idea and have even migrated over my Visualize Extended Features plugin to it. In general, I have just about everything working right except my screenshot tab stubbornly refuses to see my uploaded picture. [link to it on the Plugin site]. No differences on that version from the previous versions except licensing is now GPL instead of Creative Commons based. I’d had a few folks assure me that CC is not for software. As I’m not particularly well-informed or passionate about the subject, I changed it.

I’ll probably migrate my Related Posts plugin over there soon as well.

Took me a while to get used to the subversion stuff, but I’m using the tortoisesvn client now and getting along swimmingly with it. Might be a future “how to” article in all that… But yeah, for the developers this can be good stuff. More exposure, ratings, easy searching, hosted version control are all great benefits.

Possibly Related posts:

1. Humility and building a WordPress Plugin
2. WordPress 2.1 – Feeds
3. WordPress 2.3 and My Plugins
4. Favorite WordPress Plugins (well, for this week at any rate)
5. WordPress 2.3 and Tagging