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.
Heh, that’s a very handy little tool. It showed up that my Multi-level Navigation plugin uses get_archives instead of wp_list_categories. I hadn’t even noticed that.
Lol, I KNEW I hadn’t added get_categories in my plugin. It was an ‘unnamed’ member of the WPTavern forum who did some paid work for me and added it in place of wp_list_categories :p
A darn useful too this is. I wouldn’t have noticed that discrepancy without this plugin checker.
Yeah, I hope a bunch of plugin authors take a look at this site to pick up on things similar to what happened to you. I think if that happened, maybe more plugins would be updated and more would be in compliance with the repository guidelines. I think this also goes to show you what can actually make it to the repository.
Looking at All in One SEO Pack, it claims that I use the deprecated (pre 2.3) tag “the_tags”. and that I’m missing a $wpdb->prepare. Both of which are incorrect.
He’s pretty misleading anyway, boldly calling plugins “incompatible” with whatever version of WordPress. According to that, most of the top 15 plugins haven’t been compatible in a year.