For those who don’t know, Matt Mullenweg is an online social media entrepreneur and web developer best known for developing WordPress.
Dear Mr Mullenweg,
I love WordPress – I have to say that up-front. Since discovering it a number of years ago, I’ve turned my love of code development towards this fabulous platform, developing a number of sites (mainly for myself) and, eventually, spending time working on and supporting a number of plugins, all available via WordPress.org. And it’s plugins that I wish to talk to you about.
Plugins are one of the big things that really make WordPress what it is – and, particularly, the many thousands developed and maintained by people, like me, who do it for the love of it. Not Automattic employees, but users who contribute their times and energies for free.
You may notice that I said “thousands” of plugins rather than, say, the 21 thousand that WordPress.org currently states. That was on purpose. Do a search of plugins today and you’ll often come across a yellow box that warns you that the plugin is wildly out-of-date and may not be compatible any-more…
The box is a recent addition to the site but is highlighting a problem – people fall out of love. Either with development, a specific plugin or maybe even WordPress itself. Then a plugin becomes abandoned. The result of this is a repository full of broken and un-supported plugins which looks pretty poor, if the truth is known. And if you started using one of these before their abandonment, you may later be left with a broken site after a core update, a desperate scrabble to find the cause, a realisation that a fix for the plugin is not likely and then having to find time, but quickly, to seek an alternative. It’s not much fun.
How big an issue is this? This infographic helps (click for the full graphic)…
36% of the plugins in the repository (nearly 8000 of them) are showing the 2 years or older message.
All of this has come to my attention recently when I spent some time trying to reduce the number of errors being reported by my site. In all cases, I contacted the plugin owners to let them know so that they could look at fixing them in later releases. It was only then that I found plugins that hadn’t been updated for 2 or 3 years.
As a fellow developer I thought I’d look at taking them over – I’m sure I’d read in the forum somewhere that you could. So I contacted WordPress support and asked to be given access to what were, blatantly, abandoned plugins. The response, though, was not what I was expecting…
We don’t hand over plugins at this time (we may in the future, but we have a no-consensus on it today).
We suggest you fork the plugin (i.e. make a request to host your own) with a new name.
For something that makes WordPress looks rather un-professional this appears to be a glaring over-sight. In the case of the particular plugin that I initially contacted support about, it was already a fork from an existing abandoned plugin, so creating a third version in the archive would, well, look rubbish (but inflates the number of plugins by 3) – it would also mean starting the user base from zero, leaving behind all of the existing users.
As it turned out, I was able to get hold of the developer but he didn’t want me to take it over as I was a “stranger”, instead adding it to Github where other “strangers” could contribute instead. I later contacted another developer who had also left one of his plugins (he works for Automattic) but he didn’t even bother responding.
Of course you don’t want people taking over plugins’ when, rather than abandoned, the owners has simply not had to update it for a while. Some checks and measures do need to be put into place, but I hardly think this would be difficult . Here, for example, is my suggestion…
- Once the “2 year” message is generated, send an automated email to the developer. This would ask them to confirm that they are still supporting the plugin – a link to a form would allow them to confirm this or mark it as abandoned.
- If there is no response after,say, a month a reminder mail would be sent. If this is not responded to, the plugin would be automatically marked as abandoned.
- Once abandoned, the plugin will no longer appears in the plugin lists (or statistics!). However, they can be viewed separately so that developer can request to take ownership. Once another developer takes over it will return, seamlessly, to the lists so that users will be able to upgrade their existing version.
There is a lot of great stuff in the archive and there is no need for duplication or old, broken code. A smaller repository of quality plugins will always reflect better on WordPress than something larger but of variable quality.
Can I also make another request on behalf of the plugin developer community? Could WordPress.org look at promoting our work a little better? The plugins front page lists “Featured Plugins”, a great opportunity for you to help those people creating free plugins for your system. It’s such a shame that every single one is authored by a member of WordPress.org or Automattic.
There is a “Most Popular” list but this is dominated by similar plugins and hardly helps promote the “up and coming” developments.
Considering the vast number of WordPress installations that have some lovely “feature sliders”, this is sadly lacking from a page that could really do with one. Can I suggest that promotion of non-internal plugins would be helpful, along with a scrolling slider? At the very least, the former suggestion would be gratefully appreciated, I’m sure.
Thank you for reading.
David Artiss.
WordPress plugin developer.
Talk to me!