I just noticed that sometime today WordPress.org pushed a plugin compatibility feature. No longer is plugin compatibility merely determined by the author, but it’s being crowd sourced which is a great idea.
What do you think of it?
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I’m missing the number of votes in the consensus.
Furthermore I think it takes up a too prominent place in the plugin page. I think it should be at the very bottom. And lastly I didn’t even know there was a need for this from the community. Has a lot of plugin authors been lying about the plugin compatibility? I don’t think so.
Automattic should rather spend time cleaning up in the ideas forum, and including child themes in the theme directory :-)
I certainly agree about your points pertaining to cleaning u the ideas forum.
However, I think the plugin compatibility feature is a great add to the repository. It’s not that plugin authors are lying about compatibility. Rather, many plugins are left in the repository that aren’t maintained anymore. So there needs to be a way to validate whether they work or not. What better way to do that than letting the thousands of plugin users determine if it works?
So it’s great, PLUS this exact same feature can be usedd for child/parent theme compatibility issue addressed in the post you linked to.
It’s great if it can be used for the child theme presentation.
But the complexity is too great in my opinion. No need to ask about compatibility back to WP 1.5 and all versions of the plugin.
When I encounter a new plugin I always try to determine whether it’s good or bad from googling it, seeing when it was last updated, rankings, forum post etc. So I don’t think we the users are let totally in the dark without this feature :-)
I totally agree with that. WordPress seems to make it too easy for people for to live in the past. I think the furthest back they should go at this point is 2.x (maybe even just to 2.7).
I don’t know about the implementation, since I haven’t taken a look at it. But this seems like a great idea. ^.^