 So, without further ado, are you ready, Alex, Oki Doki, and the microphone, or are we going to... There we go. Okay, can you hear me right now? Perfect. Good. I'm not that used to speaking with Mike, but okay. Okay, we can see things on screen. So, getting your plugins ready for the new WordPress directory. Before I start, who's familiar with this? Okay, good. And who's familiar with this? Good. So, in a couple of days, you will all get familiar with that one, no matter if you like it or not, because it's coming live this month. Or, to be honest, I have this slide since January, and it's still true. But sooner or later, it will happen. And the changes are huge. It's not only about look and feel. It's also about all the entire mechanics. So, no matter you use plugin directory in order to find extensions, plugins for your website, or you are a plugin developer and you want to make sure that users can find your extensions in moments when they need things like this and they can find you using certain keywords, this talk should be helpful for you, or at least that's what I hope. So, what's new? The first thing is that it's all about the keyword search. So, you will no longer have a field for outer search or tag search. Keyword search was the most popular one by far, so it's not surprising. But in the new interface, you will just have, instead of this small field up there that you can choose between keyword tag and outer, you will have just the one filled for the search tag, and that will look for keywords. So, in this case, sorting is a very important thing, because the way things are ordered will impact the way people will choose plugins, because as we know, there are many plugins in WordPress directory, almost 50,000 of them. 50,000, no, 50,000, sorry. Am I right? Yeah, numbers in English were always difficult for me, sorry. So, what we see is that plugins has been sorted in a completely different way. And we've been working within WordPress plugin directory a lot on tweaking the new search engine and ways of different elements. And as you can see here, that's the comparison of search results for the same phrase, and two in the old and the new directory. The things in blue do not exist on the list, on the old list, and the thing in green has moved within the list. As you see in the top ten for the same phrase, you have eight new things. And I have checked that with many other phrases, and it seems like that's the trend. So, it's difficult to judge whether those plugins are better answer or worse answer to the query that user has stated, but you should be aware of the fact that it's a serious change. Like if you were trying to optimize your plugin before for the old search engine, then you need to start doing it from scratch for the new one. I've told you that there is no search, tag search. However, actually there is, it's just a little bit hidden. Like if you go to the new plugin view, single plugin view, and you click on one of those tags, you will see the list of extensions that use this tag. So it's possible it's just hidden. Then there is an outer search. Yeah, didn't I told you that it's gone? It is gone like there is no field in the interface, but still you can use URLs in order to get this, to get information about plugins of a certain outer. That's the outcome that you will see if you paste the lower URL on to the browser. Then that was there, that were the changes that are coming to the list of plugins, but there are also many changes in the single plugin view. That's the old one. So stats are gone. You won't be able to see stats anymore. Installation information will also not be there. There will be no compatibility information. I think actually nobody was using it anyway, so that's a good one. There will be no links to the older version of plugins. However, this one, that's why there is mastery at the very end, because this one is still being discussed within the plugins team, so there is chance that this will come back in one of the future versions. But as of now, there are no links to older versions of plugins available. So another thing is that there are changes to, well, the other thing that will be impacted here is the embedded plugin directory, because, as I'm sure you're all familiar with, except for the web version of plugin directory, we have the one that is embedded into our WordPress dashboard, and every WordPress dashboard. And the look and feel will stay as it was, so you can use it in exactly the same way. However, the search results will be provided through the new API, which means that the search results will be coming from the new search engine. So the look and feel will stay as it was. However, the results and the order of them will come from the new search engine. And that's the reason why we still have attack-based search and outer search available through URLs and through API, because we need that in order to maintain compatibility with embedded plugin directory. So as of now, the only changes to embedded plugin directory will be the ordering and the plugins that are being returned from the query. Look and feel stays as it is. Good, so how we can optimize the plugin? What we can do to get ready for this change. Here is my list of ideas that you can implement. First, gather your download data in a different way. If you are a plugin developer, you probably have already seen that actually the information on downloads that you get from this chart that is available in the old version of plugin directory is not very accurate, because it counts new downloads and updates as same thing. So it's actually not the real information on how many downloads you have. So I suggest dig deeper into that and look for different ways to gather statistics. I've been working for a long time with this when I was having my own plugins in the repository, so I can give you some tips on that, how you can retrieve the data of the actual number of downloads from the sources that you have. And I know that there are many different ideas, but it's like we're getting closer to the moment that you won't be able to retrieve this data from WordPress.org. However, there is one change that I'll show you in a minute that may be a small help in this. Then I think that's the part that is known by now to almost everyone. There will be only five tags per plugin in the new repository, which means that that will be the first five that you have in your readme.txt file. So if you have more than five of them, then you should definitely change the order so that the most important five will be at the beginning of the readme.txt file. Then as I told you, the installation tab is gone. So if your plugin requires some special installation procedure, then you should definitely move this to frequently asked questions section. And just write a question like, how do I install this plugin? You install it by all the information on. And we've lost screen. And we're back. Perfect. Maybe that was me. So if there is some special installation procedure, it's not like just go to your WordPress dashboard and install it. That's the place to put some information about it. Then compatibility. If there are some compatibility issues within your plugin, you should definitely put that somewhere in the description because there will be no information on compatibility anymore, as I've shown you. Statistics. There will be no statistics available except for a number of active installs for the end user. So if you want to brag about it, then again, brag about it in the description. And one tiny thing about the authors. As you may be able to see it somewhere here. Let me just move back. Yeah. The authors here are not the same authors as all contributors to plugin. There is a special tag called authors header, I guess. I can remember it correctly. And you need to set that one to put the name of authors that will be shown on the plugin list. So if you don't have that one already, that's another handy thing to do before the new plugin repository comes in place. Okay. Getting back to our list. And then there's one extra thing on top of it. There is an admin view for extension developers. Here's that brand new thing. Stats are back in there as of now. I can't guarantee that they will state her, but as of now they are there. But it's only available for plugin admins. So your regular users won't see that. You can. But that's all we have right now. And as I've told you, those downloads per day count both download and updates. So that's not the information on how many people have tried your plugin. Because every time somebody updates your plugin, it counts as downloads. And that's the fact that if you're not familiar with that one, you should remember this one as a takeaway. Okay. So my big ask to you is to help us test the new plugin repository. And no matter you are a user or a plugin developer or a website developer, we need your input. Because we've been working with that for a long time. We're trying to make it better. But we are aware that there are many things that should be improved in there. So that's why we're looking for your input. Go to WordPress.org slash plugins dash wp and provide your feedback. Tell us what's wrong. And my plugin is not shown at certain keywords on the first place. It's not a valid input. But every other is. And please do help us. Because we want to make this tool better than the previous one. And without your input, it's difficult to see whether you find it helpful or not really. Like whether you find more interesting search results thanks to that or you find more of a crap. So do tell us what you think. Okay. My name is Alexander Kuczek. And I turn web development businesses into money-making machines. If you want to get slides from this presentation, I will tweet link to them shortly on Twitter. Thank you. Okay, Bernard's going to go around with the microphone now. So if you have any questions, hands in the air. I've got one over here on the right, Bernard. Hey, Alexander. Thanks for that. Really interesting. There was some talk about a year ago. It might have actually been at this work camp where the results that were returned, that some of the older plugins that hadn't been updated for say like two or three years, might be deprioritized in the results. Has there been anything implemented in that respect? Well, that's a very hard topic, I must say. And current state is that all plugins are there, no matter they are old or not. But if something has not been updated in the last two years, it position will be decreased significantly. So unless you're looking for something very rare, or you're going, or you're looking for, or you will go to the very last page, you won't see the old plugins. I think there's a hand here as well. Hi. I work for Outlandish and we produce WP Packagist, which is the composer repository for WordPress plugins, kind of a wrapper for it. Are there any changes under the hood in the way that the new repository presents plugins over SVN or there's this kind of thing? Or is it simply just a cosmetic change to the way the interface works and the way the sorting algorithm works? Okay. If I understood your question right, you're asking whether we have changed something within the way we organize plugins or the search engine itself. It's more in terms of how the plugins are stored in the large SVN repository. No, we keep it exactly the same way as it was. Actually, you can go now and see the new version and it's based on exactly the same data we have from the old repository. Both interfaces and both search engines use exactly the same data. So we are using the same structure, but for example, as I've mentioned with the tags, we're using it in a different way. The old repository was taking all information about tags and the new one is taking only the five more recent. But it's still the same SVN and in this case nothing has changed. Good. Any more questions? Just to clarify as well, the author kind of header tag, I mean obviously there's the contributors tag that you can set in the plugin header. Is that the same thing or is this a completely separate tag? I think it's outer slash header. I think that's the name of the tag that you should be looking for. Hands up. Any more questions? One at the back on the left, Ernit. Hi, I was just wondering, you've removed quite a bit of information from the interface like installation instructions, but also compatibility info. I was wondering what the reasoning behind those choices is, if you know. Well, I ask this to my senior team members quite often, I must say, and for some of those the reason is obvious, like nobody will hardly anyone is using compatibility information. We don't have data there, so it's just an in space that is being used there. In terms of installation information, the reasoning behind that was that most of the plugins can be used... Well, installation is pretty simple. You don't need an special instruction to install a plugin. And if you need one, the frequently asked questions would be the better place to go. So the idea was that they started, before I joined with a blank page, and they start to fill in with the elements, not looking at the old directory, but thinking what actually is needed and useful, and then they've discussed the missing, or we have discussed the missing parts and decided on the faith of some small things that will be gone. Thanks to that we have way clearer interface, but of course it's also, there are information that are missing, and that's correct. Hi, I've got another question, sort of related question. Given that the compatibility information is not there, and as you say, presumably you got information that nobody was selecting from the dropdown and checking whether the plugin was compatible with them, is there going to be a recommended or guidance on how to express compatibility issues in the readme? It's particularly for plugin authors who perhaps English isn't their first language. So a way to make sure that users know this plugin will not work if you're on version 4.5, for example. Well, if I were you, I wouldn't expect any official guidance from the WordPress plugin team, but I think there will be some trend and people will start to follow it. If the big players will start to put the information about the compatibility in a certain way, then others will follow. However, I hope that again for most of the plugins that won't be the case, because they're just compatible with everything we have. And they have backward compatibility and they are compatible with the new version. So that's, again, I hope that it will work in that way, and the compatibility information will be more if you're compatible only with certain databases or you need a certain version of PHP that is higher than the base WordPress requirement. So I think that will go more for this than for compatibility with certain WordPress versions, because WordPress is going into that trend that every plugin should be compatible with every modern WordPress version. I hope that answers your question. Perfect. Any more questions, or may I go home? I see that you say that they might be removing the previous versions, the previous revisions. What happens if somebody updates a plugin and it actually breaks and you need to roll back to previous version? Well, you still have an access to SVN, I guess, but it's like you don't have links on the page because that's, again, this WordPress trend that we should all be updated and we should all run the newest version of WordPress and the newest version of plugin, and it should be working. I know it's not always the case and I see it regularly, so that may be the thing, but that's the way WordPress goes, and we want everyone, maybe in a few years, there won't be even an update button. Everything will update seamlessly, and we all would like to make that happen and make sure it won't break websites, but there is still a long way ahead of us to get there. We, yeah, just a follow-up of that. We have several problems with, you know, tags being deleted from the plugins directory, so we install using WP packages and then we point to a certain version and then, I don't know, the plugin updates to version 1.6 and we still want 1.5 and then 1.5 doesn't exist anymore. Oh. And then when we run composer update, boom. Like, so I think we, I don't know, I don't know, might be for, you know, for search purposes, use the last five-tag version, but not delete the old ones from there. Never delete the tag version from SVN. Yeah, there is no reason to delete any versions from SVN. That's the purpose of SVN, to keep all the versions there. I'm just saying that there won't be links displayed, but you should, if you are a plugin developer, obviously you should keep all the old versions there and don't remove them. Yeah, that's a very good point. Sorry to harp on about this one because I think losing the easy ability to roll back to get an old version of a plugin is going to be a huge minus. So my question is, if the tags are still there, will the automatic zip still be there as well? So if you can work out what the URL is going to be for a previous version, will you still be able to download that zip just because the link's missing from the page? Yeah, that's only links missing in the page. Like, we're talking about the interface change. Okay. But as I told you, there is a huge discussion whether that should be back or not. So I will bring this feedback to the next meeting on Wednesday and tell them that you insist you need them. Thank you. And I hope this will help. Sure, even if it's just the last three, four, five, something like that, I think would be helpful. Thank you. I'll do my best. You know, I'm a junior member there, so I don't have much to say, but I'll do my best to bring that case there. Plus one for that. I think it's pretty crazy to think that everyone's going to be happy interacting with kind of SVN and stuff. You've got a whole, like, millions of users, frankly, that would be pretty uncomfortable or not even aware of that system, frankly. So, in fact, not just plus one, plus 100 to keeping the old links, because, frankly, I think you are going to end up with real trouble with that in the future, so please keep it for the users. I'll do my best. I promise. Okay. No pressure. Yeah? If you will, yeah. If you have any more specific questions or questions related to your own plug-in or your own use case, you will be able to find me around. I'll be in the happiness bar for sure if you want to ask anything. And thank you for your time.