How to release a plugin?

[mfields]

I've spent the last month and a half working on a new plugin for WordPress. I'm really excited about it and am looking for some guidance from the community here about the best ways of releasing it. Your opinions about the following topics would be very helpful to me as I want to "get it right" the first time.

About the Plugin
I'm working on a plugin which will enable visual artists, designers and arts organizations to easily create portfolios of their work. The plugin uses a custom post type comes pre-installed with 12 custom taxonomies. This plugin will be released for free, licensed under GPLv2 and hopefully hosted at wordpress.org.

Support & Documentation
One of the features of the plugin is a built in help window. I also plan on creating publicly available videos + documentation about basic theme integration. Pretty much "this is how it works and how it is intended to be used". I really like what Justin Tadlock has done with the Hybrid Theme Club and I want to do something similar - where users would sign up to become a member thus gaining access to advanced tutorials and a support forum. This is where my first set of questions comes in:

1. What software would you use to create the forum?
2. Where would you create the advanced tutorials?

Future Development
I have so many plans for this plugin but unfortunately can't include them all in the initial release. The code is currently over 7,000 lines long with a remarkably small footprint on a WordPress installation. With such a large (for me at least) plugin I would gladly welcome others to fix bugs, develop new features, write help files etc. To accomplish this a public method of versioning and bug tracking is necessary. While there are a few different methods that I know of to accomplish this, I'm sure that there are many more. I was wondering what you would choose if you were me. Trac and Google Code are the only methods that I have ever used. Here is what I am looking for:

1. Easily create and manage bug reports.
2. Submit code changes.
3. Be publicly available to everyone.
4. Free as in beer.

So my questions would be:

1. In your opinion, what is the best solution?
2. What should I never use and why?
3. What do you use?

Feel free to be explicit as you wish, If something sucks, I don't want to deal with it. If something rules, I want to check it out. I know there are alot of people here who are very passionate about the software and services that the use and your opinions would be very useful to me and others in my situation.

Thanks for reading,
-Mike

[Ryan]

I used SMF for my forum as it includes built in support for guest post moderation, so that those wanting to ask a quick question don't need to mess around registering just to ask a simple question, plus it includes a built in subscription system which I use to handle paid support upgrades.

The problem though, is that the SMF project is on the rocks and the community around it is very unstable (the software however is fine).


For your "help window" I'd be inclined to pull the data from your own server rather than hosting it inside the plugin. I've had problems in the past when I've tried to have the same data stored in multiple places. No matter how hard I try, I always manage to forget to update one or the other and then the two (web page and plugin) end up out of sync or offering conflicting advice. So to avoid that, I much prefer the idea of hauling the data in via http. You can always cache it in the database if you are worried about page load times.

I have a handy plugin for making WordPress spit out unprocessed raw posts which you are welcome to use if you like - this is so that you can grab WordPress pages or posts, minus the theme code. I can't find any posts about it, so I'm guessing I haven't released it yet. Just email me if you have a use for it and I'll send it through.

[mfields]

Ryan, thanks for the insight! If you were going to create a new forum today, would you use SMF or would you choose another method because of community instability? Would you install it on a client site? The functionality that you listed sounds like a perfect fit for my project.

I think that is important that the help text be included directly in the plugin. This way it can be translated into other languages by nice people who know how do that kind of a thing. Unfortunately, I only speak english so I would never be able to translate on my website.

[Ryan]

Good point on the translation issue.

I'm on the fence about SMF. It does exactly what I need, but I am on the lookout for something more suitable. I haven't found anything more suitable as yet.

However if I were starting a new community I would definitely look around for something which has more of a future. The new bbPress plugin or Justin Tadlock's forum plugin look promising but are a long way off being useful for this sort of thing unfortunately.

At the moment I'm just holding off until either of those two WordPress plugins reach a reasonable development point that I'm happy to port everything over. At least with a WordPress plugin I can make it do whatever I want whereas something like phpBB would be too much a steep learning curve for a one-off project so I simply wouldn't bother.

[andrea_r]

Where is this plugin going to live (other than the repo)?

With those extensive plans, it needs either its own site, or a section off your own site.

You could put the extra tutorials in sections in the forum, or in their own blog posts (which may help them get found better by casual visitors).

[Kim]

For the forum, check out FluxBB: http://fluxbb.org/

FluxBB is very lightweight, lightning fast and can handle lots of traffic. I've set it up for clients, and am in the process of integrating it into the website for another open source project that I work on.

[mfields]

Where is this plugin going to live (other than the repo)?
With those extensive plans, it needs either its own site, or a section off your own site.

Totally plan on building a site for it. My plan is to introduce new users to WordPress via the plugin. So I will have to write in a manner that will accomplish this properly. There are so few solutions for visual artists that I have seen.... I've tried most and don't really like any of them. Just makes sense to me to add a bit of functionality to something that already rocks :)

You could put the extra tutorials in sections in the forum, or in their own blog posts (which may help them get found better by casual visitors).

After thinking about it a bit, it seems like in the forum would be the easiest to do.

[mfields]

Kim thanks! http://fluxbb.org/ looks like a great forum tool.

[mfields]

In case anyone's wondering what I'm working on, I've started recording tutorial videos. Here a link to the first: http://wordpress.mfields.org/2010/ar...e-attachments/

[Utkarsh]

I plan to use http://vanillaforums.org/ for my next project. The API to integrate looks simple enough, and the frontend UI is great and simple. You might want to have a look at that.