WordPress News

Back in April of last year, Matt posted here on the dev blog about the release of BuddyPress 1.0, a plugin that adds a social networking layer to an installation of WordPress MU. Many people were excited about the idea, but were unable to experiment with BuddyPress because they ran single installations of WordPress rather […]

There have been a lot of references to “canonical plugins” over the past year, especially at WordCamps by Matt, but we haven’t really posted anything official about the idea, nor have we really made much progress beyond discussions about how awesome it would be to have canonical plugins and how good it would be for […]

We’ve recently made some changes to help improve the communication between plugin authors and plugin users about the changes that are made between versions. We feel that all software should have a changelog that details, at a high level, what changes have been made in each version so that the user can make an informed […]

We’re excited to be part of the Change the Web Challenge. Basically, the contest is to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other variety of web application that helps people find and share opportunities to take action. The grand prize is 50 benjis, and the best WordPress plugin will also be featured in […]

One of the biggest problems and most frequent complaints we’ve had with the WordPress.org Plugins Directory is the horrible, horrible search results. No longer.  We’re now using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power search on the Plugins Directory both from the website and from within your blog’s admin (Plugins → Add […]

WordPress by itself is very simple — what makes it compelling for most of its users is the wide array of plugins (and themes) available for WP. The average WordPress blog has about 5 plugins installed! Today we just passed 4,000 plugins available in our plugin directory. (Which is also embedded into everyone’s WordPress 2.7 […]