Hello WordPress Plugin authors, here is a quick trick to link to the latest zip file of your Plugin hosted at the official WordPress Plugin directory.
In order to link to the latest zip file, you have to link to the zip file without the version number. Consider my Bulk Move WordPress Plugin. The latest version of the Plugin (at the time of writing) is 0.2. If you have to link to the latest zip file for download then you have to link to the following url http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bulk-move.zip
Right now this url points to version 0.2 and in future if I update the Plugin to version 0.3 then this url will automatically be mapped to version 0.3.
I use the above format to link to the zip files of my Plugins hosted at WordPress Plugin repository from my blog. The advantage of this method is that, I don’t need to update my links every time I update my Plugin.
Hope you find this tip useful.
I already knew about this – I use that as the download link for all my plugins. But thanks for posting it here – many new WP plugin devs will find this helpful.