Last night I started integrating one of Dougal‘s plugins into a little WordPress-based app I’m building to help me keep track of HR/benefits related requests for my team.
Since I’m building the app as a theme, I dropped the plugin into the theme. It worked great, except the path to the CSS file wasn’t correct (since the code wasn’t living in the plugins directory). A quick poke around and I found the GitHub repo for the plugin, which I quickly forked, patched (by adding a filter), and submitted back as a pull request. This morning Dougal accepted the pull request. Done and done.
At the WordPress Community Summit I participated in a session about plugin continuity and development (see Abandoned Plugins). It naturally included discussion about how the various developers there build their plugins. Most1 of those present are hosting their primary development on GitHub and checking them in to the SVN repo on WordPress.org as a packaging step for distribution.
This is why. There just isn’t a WordPress community owned property that allows for this type of developer collaboration. I think it makes sense for the plugin and theme repositories on WordPress.org to adopt a “GitHub URL” meta property for projects.2 Until they do, I’m going to start adding it prominently to the README when I release new versions of my plugins.
Fellow WordPress developers, please collaborate on my plugins on GitHub. Most of them are under the Crowd Favorite account, a handful are on my account.
This post is part of the thread: Version Control – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.
