Novice Notes on the Official WordPress Plugin Directory

As I’ve said I’ve been wrestling with the plugin directory and, as I suspected, the trouble is down to my lack of smarts. Two things to be aware of if you are wanting to host your plugins at the official site:

  • When they say that you should name your tags/releases using only numbers and periods they mean it. I was using 2.5 bxx not thinking a space would cause an issue but of course it did when the automatic updater kept giving up on the zip files it downloaded. From now on, 2.5bxx until I can drop the beta designation.
  • That stray space thing managed to keep hidden for a few days because I couldn’t even get that far. I’ve been grumbling that my installation instructions were not showing correctly and trying, in vain, to get help… well, a little while ago as I was poring over the readme.txt for the umpteenth time I was struck by lightning (OK I’m exaggerating) and thought to check the encoding of the file. I don’t know how but the readme.txt files I’d uploaded were encoded as utf-8. The Readme Validator hadn’t caught the problem but it was enough to make the directory ignore the files.

So no spaces in release tags and just plain old ANSI in the readme.

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