What do you want in a plugin manager?

  • Hi all,

    At Elixir we’re working on a plugin to manage extensions (plugins and themes). It’s early in the development period, so we’re soliciting ideas on what you’d want from something geared towards easing experimentation with the rich range of addons to WP.

    Part of my wishlist:

    • Remove some words from the vocabulary of WP usage, such as chmod.
    • Decrease the steps between ‘finding a cool extension’ and ‘activating it’ to exactly one–‘getting it in one click’.
    • Make the process of exploring and discovering themes much nicer.

    What else do you have in mind?

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • Thumbnails of course for themes. Possibly being able to download and preview the theme on your blog in one click (i.e. download it and then use like Preview Theme’s code to display it for you on your blog). Or a link to a demo blog at like Exlir of it in action — that’d work too probably.

    Plugins – have a ratings system or download count sorter. I found it hard to navigate wp-plugins.net when I first started ’cause it was a lotta plugins and I had no idea which was “best” etc.

    Maybe like a suggested plugins list or top 10 plugins would help new people a lot.

    Personaly, I’d like it to be easy to navigate. The old site was nice, but sometimes the navigation of it was clunky. A lot of it is dependant on the authors too, to properly categorize their contributions.

    Even within major categories, it would be nice to have them grouped together by functionality. IE, all of the Gravatar type plugins would idealyy be grouped together, one right after the other.

    And a search. Search is always good.

    -tg

    Thread Starter Firas

    (@firas)

    Viper and TG: Yup, we’d really like to make it easy to find what you need, using tags, number of active installs, etc. Searching, sorting, collecting data—top 10s, top rated by tag—that’s the whole point of the exercise. From ‘I need a plugin that does so and so’ to ‘hey, this works well’ should be about 5 minutes max.

    I’d like a list of plugins all in one place with descriptions telling you what each one does, ability to rate the plugins and to show the advantages and disadvantages of each over similar plugins. This would probably require alot of cooperation from the plugin authors but i’m sure that once it was done it would be a great system to have.

    Thread Starter Firas

    (@firas)

    Usayd: Well, the advantages/disadvantages thing is way too much work, but we’ll have comment areas for the extensions, so people may leave comparative comments.

    Yeah maybe if you futher that to something which can have like a checkbox saying something like ‘user of this plugin’ and then a rating, some kind of reviewing system rather then the all so basic comments systems.

    Just a bump to add something I just realized I wanted: auto-notifications of new versions.

    Have Alchemy grab the names and versions of all currently enabled plugins and compare that to the list on Elixir.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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