[wp-hackers] About page for a plugin?

[Nicholas Ciske]

On activation or upgrade? Those are entirely different scenarios -- e.g. one time vs. all the time. Sounds like BuddyPress only does so on direct *activation* (not bulk) which is not intrusive as I'm in the flow if activating that specific plugin for the first time.

Those are also all very large plugins that require significant initial setup -- so I can see the use case there. Few plugins need that kind of interaction on *every upgrade* (except maybe in the case of a major version bump with breaking changes, but a dismissible notice is still the better pattern there, if you must do anything).

The only place I could even see a potential argument for would be a direct upgrade (just that plugin) but even that is a bit overkill (and misses a lot of upgrade cases - ftp upgrades, bulk upgrades, external upgrade managers like ManageWP, etc.

If I want to see the changes, that's what the changelog option on the upgrade screen (and repo) is for.

A tab or submenu could give access to that post upgrade (e.g. the same about page he has now).

A notice is a bit more intrusive, but dismissible and can handle all cases (on next admin visit).

A redirect on upgrade is very intrusive, and misses a good deal of cases.

_________________________
Nick Ciske
http://thoughtrefinery.com/
@nciske	

On Apr 25, 2014, at 8:12 AM, J.D. Grimes <jdg at codesymphony.co> wrote:

> Both bbPress and BuddyPress do this, as does WooCommerce (and probably many others).