[wp-hackers] WP Plug-in Manager

[Jason goldsmith]

I think I am mostly following.

Personally, I am not a huge fan of plugin auto-install in any
form....I just want an easy way to know what plugins are out there and
a reliable metric of which ones are actually in use (someone else
suggested downloads, but that is an utterly useless metric for
usage....I download lots of programs that suck so bad I delete them
immediately....but I can't undownload them)

As a plugin user I want to be able to find all of the e-mail a notice
to the readers that a post has made plugins. But I don't want to guess
which ones seem to work well, I want to know what other's are using.
If one of them has 10,000 active installations and one has 5, well, I
know which bandwagon I am going to be on.

As a plugin author I want to know how many copies are actively in use
for two reasons 1) I want to know if there is any point in adding new
features (sorry but if 7 people are using a plugin, it isn't worth a
whole lot of my time) and 2) I want an idea of how many people might
be bent out of shape if I make a major change to a plugin and don't
ensure an easy migration (hey for 7 people they can fix things
manually, for 2000, I better have an automatic system)

Finally, as a plugin author, I want you to have to come to my site and
read my post and see my banner adds and my PayPal donation button.
What you do with that information is entirely up to you, but I want
you to see it. That's one of the reasons I stopped posting direct
links to the downloads on the existing plugin sites.