Plugin Developers: How to Grab WordPress.org Information for Your Site

Life as a plugin developer can be hard.

Not only do you actually have to develop plugins, if you’re doing your job right you have to provide all of the necessary documentation. You should probably have a dedicated page on your website for your plugin, filled with lots of useful information relating to its usage and such. Yep – even if all of that information is already on WordPress.org, nestled intuitively within the various tabs such as “Installation” and “FAQ”.

Fortunately, there is a way to halve the time spent doing all of this boring, non plugin development stuff, and that is to pull all of the information you carefully assembled for your plugin’s readme.txt, and repurpose it for your plugin’s page on your own site.

What you need is WP Plugin Info.

Unlimited Plugin Data at Your Fingertips

WP Plugin Info provides you with the ability to grab just about any piece of data or information stored on WordPress.org relating to your plugin (or any plugin, for that matter). In order to pull a piece of information, just use one of the plugin’s simple shortcodes.

For example, here’s how to grab the average rating for the official Facebook plugin:

{code type=”html”}

[wp-plugin-info plugin_id=”facebook” info_id=”rating”]

As you can see, the format is pretty straightforward – you enter the plugin’s ID, followed by the identifier for whatever piece of data you are looking for. This is what the plugin spits out:

Obviously the plugin displayed the rating only – the other words came courtesy of my artistic license. As you can see, the rating is returned as a 0/100 number, rather than a 0-5 rating. This is because the plugin is pulling the raw data from WordPress.org.

With WP Plugin Info, you can pull pretty much any piece of data or information you would like. Here’s a selection relating to the plugin I released on WordPress.org just a few days ago, Easy Tweet Embed:

And here are the screenshots:

You get the idea. If you’re a plugin developer, you can use WP Plugin Info to essentially build your official page, complete with all the vital statistics, screenshots, installation instructions, your FAQ, and so on.

Now I’m off to go and do just that on my own site!

Download WP Plugin Info here.

Creative Commons image courtesy of choffee

Tags:

• developers
• wordpress.org