WP Contributions is a new plugin by Dustin Filippini, Damon Cook, and WebDevStudios that displays WordPress contributions via widgets. Widgets included are:
- Contributions to the Codex
- WordPress Core Contributions
- Featured Plugin
- Featured Theme
Once activated, browse to Appearance > Widgets to access the new widgets. You’ll need to know your username for WordPress trac and the Codex to display your contributions. Keep in mind that the core contributions widget only list tickets that are closed and you received props for.
The Codex contributions widget displays the most recent articles you’ve edited along with a link to see more.
The theme and plugin widgets use the slug of the theme and plugin you want to feature. You can only feature one theme or plugin at a time unless you use multiple widgets. The featured plugin widget displays a thumbnail of the plugin’s header image, author name, version, description, average rating, total downloads, and when it was last updated.
The featured theme widget displays a small preview of the theme, a short description, average rating, author, current version, total downloads, and when it was last updated.
Even though the plugin and theme widgets are meant to be used to showcase your own work, they’re great for featuring any plugin or theme you’d like people to know about. WP Contributions comes with a series of template tags for those who want more control over how the information is displayed.
One thing I’d like to see in a future version is short code support. This way, users could create a WP Contributions page on their site with easy to use short codes. It’s not supported now, but Filippini informs me that a future version will include the ability to display badges attached to a WordPress.org user profile.
As WordPress continues to increase in marketshare, the ability to show how much you’ve contributed to the project is a huge resume booster, especially if you can say your code runs on millions of sites. In early 2014, WordPress made substantial improvements to user profiles but there’s no easy way to display those contributions to a wider audience.
WP Contributions does a decent job filling the void and is available for free on the WordPress.org plugin directory. I tested WP Contributions on WordPress 4.2.2 and it works without any problems.
Id love to get some feedback on the plugin and Feature requests. You can enter issues on Github https://github.com/WebDevStudios/WP-Contributions and I’ll keep an eye on the comments. We do have the short code and badges planned for the next release.