Nick Hamze, a collaborator and friend goes into detail about why the WordPress plugin ecosystem needs some proper curation. I couldn’t agree more, the new user experience for WordPress users, in this regard is just not that great. That’s why I was eager to work with Nick on building out a very simple plugin + API to power a better “Recommended” tab for the plugins page in your wp-admin.

The current API is pretty simple and simply pulls a curated list of plugins (literally powered by a text file) and fetches data for those plugins using the WordPress.org plugins API (which was probably the hardest part of this project, as it’s very poorly and sometimes inaccurately documented — perhaps I should blog about the pieces I was able to figure out on my own). However, if the idea is well received in the community, I’d love to expand on it further and include some plugins from outside the WordPress.org plugin repository in our recommendations, as I think there’s some great third-party plugins that new users should definitely know about.

If you work for a WordPress hosting company, Nick’s inviting you to get in touch and discuss adding the plugin to your customer’s installations. Both the plugin and the small API server that powers the recommendations are fully open source as well, so feel free to fork them to create your own set of recommendations.

Read more about this on Nick’s Secret Pizza Party blog post

Let me know if you have any thoughts in the comments 💭👇