[wp-hackers] Development Process

[Doug Stewart]

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Craig wrote:
> Doug said:
> "There needs to be a Dashboard widget that alerts blog owners to the fact
> that DrDave has updated SK2, that Mark J.'s Subscribe To plugin has
> patched a security hole, or that Skippy's Gravatars plugin now lets you
> select between curl() and fopen()."
> 
> I don't disagree, however, not everyone has a dashboard, and most
> people wouldn't know what to do with some of the updates or what they
> mean. Example, I have not a friggin clue about curl() and fopen() and
> whether or not it would be worth updating. This puts the onus back on
> the plugin developers to properly document and inform their userbase,
> which is often not something that happens. How many plugins are
> created for a specific user (author, mostly) and then just released to
> the wild with little or no support? Lots of them, I'm sure.
> 
> I don't have an answer on how to manage plugins, but I agree that this
> is a necessary discussion.
> 
>

Craig:
Those authors just releasing into the wild most likely won't be bothered
to sign their plugin up at the official site and keep it updated
whenever a new version is released.

I'm also envisioning a "digg"-esque sort of front end, where actual
users could mod plugins up or down  and once a plugin was lowered past a
certain threshold, an email would be fired off to the plugin author
saying "15 people anti-dugg your plugin's entry for being out-of-date.
Time to update your meta info on pluginrepo.wordpress.org!"  Let network
effects take care of lazy, shiftless layabouts.


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Doug Stewart
Senior Systems Administrator/Web Applications Developer
Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Labs
dstewart at atl.lmco.com
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