During the WordPress Community Summit pre-planning sessions, it became obvious that there’s not a lot of good communication about what we do, plan, and code for the WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ website itself. So, after a bit of chatter, Make-MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. was born. This is where we plan on talking about changes to the WordPress.org site, as well soliciting feedback for feature ideas. Consider it a community site; we don’t always know what the best way to make the website work is, so feedback is not just welcome, but encouraged.

In order to kick things off properly, I figured I’d announce a new feature: Reviews!

After a lot of discussion, it became clear that a “pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party review” concept was very much desired by the community in general. So we implemented reviews, but didn’t bother to limit it to just plugins. So now, plugins and themes can have reviews.

In order to keep things straight, reviews are tied to ratings. In order to rate a plugin, you must write a review as well. All the old ratings are still there and won’t be going away (we use those, after all), but if you want to change your rating in the future, well, explain it. Tell your side of the story. What’s broken? What works? What’s the best and the worst of the code? How can the plugin or theme author improve it?

Communication is important, and “support” is only half of the equation. Feedback is critical, and hopefully, the new Reviews system will go a long way to improving communication between the many millions of users of code we host on WordPress.org and the many thousands of contributors who write the themes and plugins that we all use every day. And all reviews go into our forums and can be commented on by everybody, just in case somebody needs some extra help.

(Note to Plugin/Theme authors: You can subscribe to your reviews alone via RSS feedRSS Feed RSS is an acronym for Real Simple Syndication which is a type of web feed which allows users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format. This is the feed., but the email subscription is cross-tied to the support-forum email subscriptions. If you’re subscribed to those, you will get review emails as well.)

There won’t be a lot of reviews at first, but hey, that’s where you come in! Just to get everybody started, I went ahead and wrote a couple of reviews to kick things off. So if you want to see it in action immediately, you can see them here:

https://wordpress.org/support/view/theme-reviews/twentytwelve

https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/hotfix

These are accessible for any plugin or theme through the “Reviews” tab. Alternately, try to rate a plugin or theme and you’ll be sent to the review form as well.

Note that this is “iteration 1” of the feature. I expect to make many visual and stylistic changes over the next couple of weeks, and perhaps add a few new features. If you have a great idea for a feature or enhancement, feel free to comment and let me know. (Don’t bother me with the visual-only stuff yet, I know the CSSCSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site. needs some love. Also, reviews don’t really display all that well on profiles yet; I know, working on it.)

BTW, the majority of the code to power the reviews came from our own Scott Reilly, who is, frankly, a genius. Give him mega props. 🙂