As you may know already (and if you don’t, dude, follow me) I participated in the recent WordPress Plugin competition. The results are out and even though my Plugins were not selected, I received a much more valuable gift. Guess what, a detailed review of all my five Plugins by my favorite WordPress expert and a great inspiration Ozh.
The following are the lessons that I learned from the reviews
- The details that you enter in the Plugin’s page like Plugin Description, screenshot, installation instructions, FAQ, example usage etc, but really help you to get more users for your Plugins
- When you are using PHP 5+ only features, make sure that you have a fall back mechanism and correct warning to users.
- When making calls to API’s it is better to use the built-in WP_Http class instead of CURL or sockets
- Don’t hardcode the Plugin directory or file name, some users may change it, which might break your Plugin.
- Similarly don’t hard code wp-content directory path. Some users might move their wp-content directory to a different path which might again break your Plugin.
- If you need scripts or CSS, to be included, then include them only to the pages that need them and not to all pages.
- If you are creating a table or storing too many options in db, then it is always better to provide an uninstall hook to clean this stuff when the Plugin is delete by the user.
I am guilty of most of them and I am in the process of modifying my Plugins to fix these issues and over a next couple of days you could see updates to most of my Plugins.
It’s always nice to get feedback for your work from someone whom you respect and in that way I am really very happy that I participated. Thanks Ozh for your time and feedback and WTC for sponsoring the competition and wishes for the winners.
Thanks for the thanking Sudar, and you’re welcome 🙂
It’s been quite a task but it’s been interesting to review all the plugin, so I hope the short feedback I wrote for each plugin will help some authors in future improvements, and I’m certainly happy when someone says it did help 🙂
Cheers!
@Ozh,
Your reviews really helped me to identify certain mistakes that I was making. Thanks 🙂
Hey Sudar
These sound like some really solid feedback. Its always interesting to figure out how the experts do it and what does it take for a plugin to garner acceptance in this really crowded space.
Looking forward to your new and improved plugins.
@Abhimanyu,
Thanks for stopping by 🙂
Yes it is always good to find out how the experts do it.
your comment is really fruitfull, i think this helps me to .