Let me start off by saying, I have been meaning to write this post for quite some time now. I have been extremely busy lately and have not had much time for anything, let alone writing a blog post. As I am writing this, I am on my way back to Allentown, PA after a short break in Rehoboth Beach, DE. Anyway, let us get down to it.

There is a flaw in the WordPress.org plugin directory. It is a rather large flaw to be honest, and it is something that has plagued our recent series of upgrades to Google Analyticator. We recently added a new dashboard widget to Google Analyticator that mimics the Google Analytics dashboard using the Google Analytics API and a series of AJAX requests. We took over twenty hours developing and testing this new feature. We tested the plugin using MAMP with PHP4 and PHP5 in Opera 9, Safari 3/4, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 7/8, and Firefox 2/3. Everything appeared to be working properly and we thought we were ready for the release. After releasing Google Analyticator 5.0, we soon found we were wrong.

As soon as we released the latest version of Google Analyticator, our support forums were flooded with problems. Unfortunately for us, a huge majority of these support requests all appeared to be the same issue. For anyone who has ever done software support, you know the users usually do not give you nearly enough information to solve the problem. The general message we got off the forum was “the plugin breaks my dashboard”. They sometimes would not give us a URL to their site or even the version of the plugin or WordPress. After doing a massive search for information over the course of a two week period, we eventually found the plugin had problems in some IIS installations, memory issues with certain server configurations, issues with Google’s AuthSub using multi-part domains, and issues with people using brand new Google Analytics accounts. Those two weeks were some of the roughest I have experienced since Spiral Web Consulting began maintaining Podcasting and Google Analyticator. It took us two weeks and five releases to get our dashboard widget to work properly. Here is an example of the final version.

This brings me to the point of my post. We tested this plugin as thoroughly as possible on our end. We did everything we could to try and prevent any issues, but we could not test on every possible server configuration. Google Analyticator is not the largest plugin in the directory by any means, but with almost a half a million downloads it is far from small. We cannot test all the installations that run our plugin. Every large piece of software runs beta releases, especially open source software. WordPress.org’s plugin directory needs to introduce some sort of beta release option for the plugins listed in the directory. As a plugin developer, I would love the option to give people the chance to beta test a plugin before the official version is released. We need the option to use the community as a tool of our development. As a plugin grows, it becomes more and more discouraging for plugin developers t continue due to the additional support requests that come with each new feature. If we could eliminate some of that unneeded stress, plugins could grow more. WordPress is growing at an ever-increasing rate, why limit its possibilities by making plugins difficult to advance with it? The time has come that beta version become an official part of WordPress.org. Voice your opinion now and be heard!