The demand for WordPress plugin developers has grown with the popularity of WordPress. This amazing blogging platform, has been designed to be customized and improved from day one, and as a result plugin developers are busily employed coming up with new plugins, and improving existing ones. The ease of use of WordPress, is one reason why people love it so much.
Ubiquity. This little ditty allows you to search PHP and WordPress documentation which obviously is a great facility to have at your finger tips. Mozilla labs developed this add-on for Firefox, and as they also developed Firefox, they should know what they are talking about.
The WordPress plugin ideas forum is exactly that. Ideas for developing new plugins. Any kind of creative, development process will sometimes stall and hit brick walls, so this could be just what you need to give the creative juices a nudge in the right direction.
WordPress plugin directory. If you are wondering what advantages there are to having your plugin hosted at this directory, then consider the following points.
- You do not pay for hosting and bandwidth
- You get SVN repository to manage your plugin versions
- You get free download statistics
- You get free promotion for your plugins
It only takes around thirty minutes to get up and running, and once you do, you have another opportunity to spread the word.
Creating a good readme file for your plugin gives you advantages in two ways. One, many people are more likely to download a plugin that has a readme file associated with it, as this provides information relevant to the plugin which are extremely useful to the user. The second advantage, is that when people start using the plugin, inevitably, questions that are support related will be asked. If you have provided a readme file then many support questions will be answered in the document, and this will also help you stay on top of the support question workload. The link above is a standard WordPress readme.txt, which gives you a good pointer in creating your own document.
Plugin in promotion is the next step after you have finished it and prepared the readme documentation. There are some tried and tested steps to follow, which are shown below.
1. Go to WordPress Plugins and Hacks forums.
2. Create a new topic.
3. Create a template for your plugin, including a description and URL. Simple but informative is the rule here.
4. To maximize the plugins exposure, create a topic at Weblog Tools Collection forum using the same template. The great thing about doing this, is that after the Weblog Tools Collection Team reviews the topic, it is added to their regular news posts which appears in the dashboard of every WordPress user. For exposure, this is pretty amazing.
5. As users look for plugnis at wp-plugins.net make sure you post your plugin on this site.
6. To gain more exposure, ensure that you add your plugin to the WordPress Plugin Compatibility list. If you haven’t done so already, you need to register.
7. Announce the plugin on your blog. Maybe over the course of a week, just to maximize the plugin’s exposure.
There are more plugin developer tips which we hope to bring you in the near future, in the meantime, these are a good place to start.
If you are a WordPress plugin designer, it is essential that you market the plugin with the same zeal that you developed it. If you do not, then your plugin may never get the wide spread appeal that it should get, and that would be a tragedy.
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April 11th, 2010 at 5:24 am
Wow!!!This one is cool, and for number 8 and 9? Let me add something, next step is maybe its better not to forget the optimization, then the last one is to properly load JavaScript with wp_enqueue_script…I guess this is how I develop wordpress plugin.