The growing number of plugins is part of what makes WordPress so appealing. There’s literally a WordPress plugin for everything; from contact forms, to security, to holiday snow. That being said, entering into the world of WordPress plugins may be challenging, particularly if you haven’t already established yourself as a leading plugin author.
Today, Vladimir Prelovac, the brains behind ManageWP, announced the release of the Plugin Discovery Tool on ManageWP.org, a tool that will increase the discoverability of new plugins and plugin authors.
Torque reached out to Vladimir Prelovac to learn more about his journey, his new plugin discovery tool, and future initiatives for ManageWP.
Torque: How did you first get involved with WordPress?
Vladimir: It was in 2007, and I was eager to get entrepreneurial. I decided I needed a blog and after trying a couple of options I opted for WordPress. A fateful decision as it turns out.
As a developer, I quickly became a part of the community and started building a name for myself by creating useful WordPress plugins, writing about WordPress and eventually writing a book on WordPress development.
Torque: What was your objective when you first founded ManageWP back in 2010? How has that evolved over the years?
Vladimir: At first ManageWP came out of a need to solve the problem of managing multiple WordPress sites. At the time there were no tools to do that and ManageWP was in many ways revolutionary. And we solved a pretty big problem for many people. With years, WordPress evolved and so did we.
Now we are shifting focus to WordPress experience itself and making ManageWP a unique WordPress productivity tool.
I am pretty excited to announce that we are again going to change the whole landscape with a revolutionary new platform coming out for ManageWP’s birthday in January.
Torque: What’s the biggest challenges you’ve faced throughout the lifespan of ManageWP? What did you do to overcome this?
Vladimir: The main challenge for me was growing the company as I obviously knew nothing about it when I started. Now we have over 20 employees and getting there was not easy, but it was an exciting ride that I will never forget 🙂
I am pretty excited about our future. The best is yet to come.
Torque: Can you talk a little about the initiative behind the new plugin discovery tool, and you hope you accomplish with it?
Vladimir: Sure, in 2013 we launched ManageWP.org, a non-profit reddit-like site for the WordPress community as our way of giving back to the WordPress project. The site was built to capture the pulse of the community in real-time, and since the launch we helped discover and promote over 1,500 WordPress blogs and authors.
We are taking this concept a step further, and are now introducing a tool that will help discover new plugins and plugin authors. It is actually based on a plugin discovery concept I introduced back in 2011.
We’ve built a technology that is able to find best new plugins using a number of factors. We also have the full database of WordPress plugins and have built relations between them, so we can do things like ‘related plugins’ and much more in the future.
Plugin authors can use it to track the success of their plugin in a much more detailed way than in WordPress repository, and we also plan to support links to their premium versions or support offering.
In short our goal is to build a sophisticated plugin discovery tool using latest technologies and make it available to the entire community.
3 Comments