Night Dreaming (by Sudar)

One of the most missed features in the official WordPress Plugin repository is the ability to specify the change log for your Plugins. There was no unified way for the Plugin developers to specify the changes that were made to the Plugin in each version.

Thanks to some great work done by Peter Westwood and Mdawaffe, we now have support for changelogs in the WordPress Plugin Readme standard. The information specified in the changelog will be displayed in a separate tab in the WordPress extend pages like shown in the below screenshot from WTC.

Since it has become as part of the readme file standard, I have added support for changelogs to my WordPress Plugin readme generator which I have released sometime ago. Now you can create readme files for your Plugins with changelogs using the WordPress Plugin readme generator. Try it out and let me know if you face any issues or have any suggestions.

After writing some WordPress Plugins recently, I found that it takes a lot of effort to generate the Readme file for each of them.

For the uninitiated, readme file is a text file which has meta information about the Plugin and is usually bundled with the Plugin. Readme files for WordPress Plugins are very important, especially if you are planning to upload them to the official repository. WordPress follows a standard for the readme file so that the official repository can parse the meta information present in the file and render it like shown in the below screenshot.

The official Plugin repository has a sample readme file and also a validator. The readme file should have some tags and the text should be specified in the markdown format.

I was looking for ways to automate the process of generating these readme files and didn’t find a solution. So I created my own 🙂

You can find the WordPress Plugin readme file generator in my projects page and you can use it to generate the readme file for your WordPress Plugins too. 🙂

Try it out guys and let me know if you want any other feature to be added to it.