Software Testing Blog

We’ve discussed WordPress’s plugins before.  Like many pieces of software, WordPress has implemented a plugin mechanism to make customization easier.  But as we’ve discussed before in our post about the problems with plugins, the downsides of plugins written by random people can include more security problems, integration issues, bugs, and more.

That may change if WordPress adopts a new proposal for what they’re currently calling canonical plugins.  In their words:

Canonical plugins would be plugins that are community developed (multiple developers, not just one person) and address the most popular functionality requests with superlative execution. These plugins would be GPL and live in the WordPress.org repo, and would be developed in close connection with WordPress core.

Of course, picking the right canonical plugins to support relies on something else WordPress does well: plugin rating and reputation.  The next step will be integrating all of that information, support, and functionality in a future version of WordPress (maybe 3.0?).  With all of these features, WordPress is rapidly shaping up to be a strong role model in plugin architecture for platform developers everywhere.