New Policy Coming to WordPress Plugin Repository: Plugins Not Updated in 2 Years Will Be Hidden

Big news from Matt’s State of the Word address at WordCamp San Francisco is a new policy concerning WordPress plugins. Those plugins that have not been updated in two years will be hidden both in the repository and in the WordPress admin plugin search. I’d say this is a big win for all WordPress users worldwide.

Siobhan recently conducted a fantastic investigation of the current state of the WordPress plugin repository, which revealed that more than half of the plugins in the repository are not compatible with WordPress 3.x. Her analysis also showed that only 32% of those 15,000+ plugins have been updated in 2011.

WordPress plugin repo is growing all the time and there’s bound to reach a point when there’s more junk than gold. Can things be changed before then?

For more information, check out her article: What Lurks in the WordPress Plugin Repository?.

It’s good to see that the WordPress plugin repository will soon be a more useful resource where you won’t have to sift through as many old plugins in order to find the good ones. Hopefully WordPress users will get fewer PHP warnings, errors and notices when testing out plugins. Looks like the WordPress plugin repository won’t become a wasteland afterall! We’re looking forward to all the changes and hope to see a more advanced search form built in as well.

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