IncludeWP Is A New Home For WordPress Frameworks

After the plugins review team made a statement disallowing frameworks in the repository last March, Co-founder of Freemius Vova Feldman decided to find them a new home. With help from Luca Fracassi from Addendio, Feldman and his team created IncludeWP, a hub to display all open-source frameworks for WordPress.

IncludeWP uses the WordPress.org APIs and SVN to automatically identify which .org frameworks plugins and themes are using, which empowers developers to see who exactly is using their product. Moreover, it also enables them to start a new product with a strong foundation. The work behind the project is all open-source and can be found on GitHub.

Why IncludeWP?

As Feldman said in the release “Code reusability is awesome!” That is the whole idea behind the project. Sharing code is the foundation of WordPress.

Having foundations for a theme or plugin already available will make your workload smaller. It doesn’t make sense to continue to rewrite the same functionality over and over, so check with IncludeWP before you begin to see if there’s a framework that suits your needs.

How To Pick The Right Framework

In the release, Feldman included tips for making sure you’ve chosen a framework that will work for you:

• Begin by seeing what is already in the market and what functionality you should be looking for.
• Look for a more popular project, which will have a stronger framework behind it.
• Check out new frameworks to see how the code is evolving.
• Most importantly, ask advice from developers you trust.

Add Your Own Framework

You can start using IncludeWP today and begin your next project. If you would like to add your own framework you can. Just fork IncludeWP repo, add your framework as <name>.php in the src/frameworks folder, and submit a Pull Request.

Before submitting, make sure it follows these guidelines:

• GPL: The framework must be licensed as GPL, so plugins and themes that use it can be listed on WordPress.org (a non-GPL framework renders the plugin  non-GPL).
• GitHub: The framework must have a public repository on GitHub that we can link to and pull in stats from.
• Stick to the format: Fill out all the same fields as the other frameworks in src/frameworks.
• WordPress.org (optional): If the framework is already listed as a plugin on WordPress.org, please add a reference to the plugin’s slug.
• Short description: Keep the description for the overview page short & sweet.

IncludeWP is ready to use today. Get on there and start finding frameworks.