170 Plugin Releasing and Promotion

Part of the “How to Write a WordPress Plugin” series

So, your plugin is finish! Sorry, it’s not! Plugin development does not end when you’ve finished coding, there are several more items you need to consider. Items such as documenting, publishing, localizing and promoting your plugin.

This Lesson – Objectives

In previous lessons we introduced plugins, built a basic working plugin template file structure and created a plugin class for our plugin.

In this lesson, you will learn about;

• managing plugin documentation,
• providing plugin support,
• managing your plugin using SVN,
• publishing your plugin to the WordPress Plugin Repository and
• distributing and promoting your plugin.

We will not be discussing handling localization in this lesson. That will have to wait for another time.

Series Contents

 

Topic Contents

Plugin Documentation and Support
Documentation Befits for the Plugin Author
Plugin Homepage
Your Plugin Readme.txt File
Writing Your Plugin Readme.txt File
Plugin Header Section

1. Plugin Name
2. Contributors
3. Donate Link
4. Tags
5. Requires at Least
6. Tested Up to
7. Stable Tag
8. License
9. Short Description

Body Sections

== Description ==
== Installation ==
== Frequently Asked Questions ==
== Screenshots ==
== Changelog ==
== Upgrade Notice ==
== Arbitrary Section (Optional) ==

Readme.txt Examples
Adding a Plugin Banner Image
Providing Plugin Support
Code Management and Plugin Repository

Requesting WordPress Repository Access

Using Subversion (Svn)

Repository Checkout
Copy Your Plugin to the Repository
Add Files to Source Control
Submit the Plugin’s Codebase
Tag and Release

WordPress Plugin Release and Promotion Conclusion