Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.
This week we talk about the new features and look of the WordPress plugin repository.
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If you’ve visited the Plugin Repository this week, you may have noticed some big changes to the site. The WordPress team has been working hard on this new version of the site and I think it looks great.
If you visit WordPress.org/plugins the first thing you’ll see is a big beautiful search box. Which is great, you are probably looking for some very specific function that you aren’t going to find in one fo the popular apps listed up top.
Below the search tab you’ll see a few curated plugins listed in the featured and popular sections, featuring classic hits like Yoast SEO and bbPress. For some reason, Akismet and Jetpack appear in both of these sections, which seems a little unnecessary. It’d be cool if they could feature some plugins that weren’t also in the popular section.
At the bottom of this new page is something I”m very excited about, the Beta section. Here you can see, test, and support new plugins. This gives new developers a chance to get easy feedback before going live.
Things also look different inside the plugin itself. Like before you have the large image, plugin name, developer name and download button, but the sidebar is gone making it easier to get to that download quickly.
Before, you had to toggle between tabs to read see a description, screenshots, developer list, reviews and FAQ. Now, you can get on overview by just scrolling down. This new system is much more like Apple’s app store where everything is in one place.
Like before, you still have the Version number, when it was last updated, ratings and more. There are two big changes here I’m most excited about. The Active Installs can go past 1 million. Here you see 3+. This shows a truer number than before.
And maybe my favorite change of all is the Tested Up To category. The old version said Compatible up to, and that was a bit confusing, at least to us at Torque.
So we’re happy to see the more straight forward, “Tested up to” label added.
overall the design is clean and easy to follow. What do you think of the changes? Is there anything else you would like to see? Let us know in the comments below.
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