WordPress.org

One of the greatest things about WordPress has always been the amazing number of high-quality plugins available for the platform. I believe that there aren’t any more “killer features” in software, there are 10,000 killer features and everyone has a different 20. If we tried to put everything into WordPress the result would be, for lack of a better term, bloated. However through our robust plugin API people have used WordPress as a platform for building almost anything you can imagine leveraging the huge WP userbase and scalable core codebase.

That’s all fine and dandy, but having all these plugins isn’t that useful if you’ve got no place to find them. Even though we have provided development hosting at wp-plugins.org for years, we hadn’t had a user interface to the plugins hosted there, which I think was a travesty.

No longer! Our ever-expanding “extend” section now has a brand-spanking new plugins directory where you can browse, download, rate, and comment on all your favorite plugins. I highly encourage you to go check it out.

For users, this means:

• There is now a central place to find and download WordPress plugins.
• You can get a much better idea about plugin quality and compatibility from the site.
• In the future you’ll be able to get notification inside of WordPress about plugins you use that have updates.

For developers, you now have:

• Exposure to the millions of people who visit WordPress.org every month.
• Free SVN hosting for GPL plugin development at wp-plugins.org. (Like always.)
• Automatic download packages and free hosting of those.
• Statistics about how many people are using and downloading your plugins.
• Prominent links to your homepage, and the ability to specify a Paypal donation link from your plugin page.

As a developer all you need to do to start taking advantage of the new plugin pages is to include a properly formatted readme.txt file along with your plugin.

Props to Michael Adams, Mark Jaquith, and Matt Thomas for making this dream a reality. We hope you all enjoy it and if you have any feedback blog it and link back to this entry so we get the pingback. Happy downloading!