After State of the Word, you may have noticed a couple new things for plugins and themes.
This is the start of a broader categorization of plugins and themes. The eventual goal of which is to help users to better find plugins or themes that fit their needs.
Categories
So we started looking at basic categories for plugins and themes, and how we would integrate that into wordpress.org.
One thing we noticed immediately was that there are a lot of commercial plugins and themes. They’re not the majority, but there are a lot of them that have a lot of users.
The other thing we noticed was there were a lot of community based plugins and themes, which are open source on Github or some other repository system.
In both cases, it became very clear that we didn’t have any easy way to link back to those systems. We have support forums for all of the plugins, but we often get questions about the commercial version of a plugin. Similarly, we don’t have any obvious way to link back to a github, for example, to provide users a way to contribute to that community.
So we introduced a new taxonomy to our systems, and now plugins and theme authors can opt into it, if they want.
How to opt-in
To opt in a plugin or theme, email [email protected], or [email protected], and simply ask to opt into it. This is a manual process for now. In the future, we will be adding a method for plugins and themes to do it themselves.
Once your plugin or theme is added, you will get a new feature (on the advanced tab for plugins, or at the bottom of the listing page for themes). For both cases, it’s a simple URL entry.
For commercial, this will show up as a support link. For community, this will show up as a contribute link.
More to come…
And, of course, this is in no way final. We plan to use this and other categories in the future to improve the overall directory system as a whole. In what ways, we don’t exactly know just yet. We value your input, and look forward to seeing what ideas the community has. 🙂