A friend of mine and I have been developing our plugins for 3.5 years (since before the rise of AI).

We woke up one morning to find our WordPress plugin featured in the Plugin Directory. What a happy surprise!

I have some thoughts and wanted to share them. I won't say which plugin it is here, but it's easy to figure out from my profile.

What this means

• When you add a plugin from the Directory, you see us (for the next ~2 weeks)
• We are shown on the wp.org/plugins homepage
• Every day, the order of plugins is randomized. So it might be #1 on one day and #8 on another
• This got us from 70+ installs to 100+ - now the featured plugin with the most active installs! ✅

How we got there

• We applied in the WordPress.org Slack channel #featuredplugins that Nick Hamze started a few months ago
• Never got any feedback about our submission and thought we wouldn't get featured (well, it is what it is)
• Continued to work on updates and helping our users
• At some point just noticed being featured randomly (no notice)
• We'll of course continue providing updates and support to make our users happy! That's the main goal after all.

The WordPress Ecosystem

• It's really great that smaller developers are being supported this way (thanks Nick for starting this!)
• We watched other featured plugins previously not get that many additional installations. But at least it makes starting out a little bit easier and it's a great feeling to get noticed that way!
• The number of active installations is still very, very important for how likely you are to show up in a search in the Plugin Directory. While I think this is a good decision overall, it makes it extremely hard for new plugin developers and it really, really favors old plugins. Some change would be great here.