WordPress Plugin Compatibility Checker

Community member Andrea passed this along on Twitter the other day. It’s called the WordPress plugin compatibility checker. The sites to scan the WordPress repository on a regular basis to show plugin authors if their plugin meets the guidelines for compliance. Amongst the data collected so far, it has been discovered that a few false positives do exist. If your plugin happens to have one of these false positives, I recommend signing up to the BraveNewCode forum and let them know so they can increase the accuracy of their dataset.

According to this dataset created on May 13, only 63.8% of plugins are compliant out of 4,920 total plugins. I think it’s interesting to just browse down the list and look at all of the fancy names developers have come up with. After browsing through the list, it appears to me that the error which appears the most has to do with wp-content being hardcoded at least once. The most likely reason for this error showing up is because of the following:

Max WP – The maximum WordPress version this plugin is compatible with. The most common cause of a lower version here is the hardcoding of the wp-content directory (wp-content can be moved as of WP 2.6). Plugins should be referencing WP_CONTENT_DIR instead of using wp-content directly.

So it does not seem like an end of the world scenario. Just for giggles, I looked up Podpress and oh my, what a naughty little plugin this thing is. This just a snippet of the errors this scan found. Check out the page and scroll down to Podress to see the full extent.

Have fun with this resource and let me know what interesting things you find.