Choose a good name for your plugin
On WordPress Stack Exchange we follow a basic rule when we edit titles: Remove redundancy, be specific. Useless words are help, problem, issue and WordPress. It is a website about WordPress problems after all, we help each other. We know that already, no need to put that into the title.
Unfortunately, not all questions are edited, so these words aren’t banned completely.
I wish the plugin repository on wordpress.org had a similar rule. Looking at the list of all plugins should tell you why: There are hundreds of plugins with wp or wordpress in their names, mostly at the beginning. And many other plugins end their name with plugin.
Please, if you develop a plugin, don’t do that.
- It is redundant. When your users download a WordPress plugin they don’t need to be reminded about that fact by your plugin name.
- It smells like spam, like a very poor attempt to look official. But no, you made that plugin, not WordPress.org.
- It is very annoying to scroll through a list of locally installed plugins when so many directories start with the same letters.
Find a good name, easy to read, to spell and to remember. Thank you.
userabuser – 15.01.2013 15:37
Hey Mr. Toscho,
Nice post… I agree with you, but I’d like to share some light on the reason as to why people do this and it doesn’t really have anything to do with “looking official”.
The reason why most people append or prepend “WP” or “WordPress” to their plugin names is mostly to do with marketing.
This is especially true in the premium plugin niche where “WP” and even the less commonly used “WordPress” or even the word “Plugin” in plugin titles do assist with search rankings and getting the attention of potential buyers, either through email marketing lists, syndicated content sites and more.
Also in some particular niches, like “Internet Marketing”, the prefix “WP” in a plugin name is almost mandatory in order to get the attention of potential buyers and it does in fact go a long way in boosting sales you might otherwise miss out on.
People have become so familiar with the acronym “WP” that when you attach it to your plugin or theme name its almost instantly recognizable from a product and branding stand point.
Yours,
-userabuser
Pippin – 23.01.2013 17:44
If you are submitting your plugin to the WordPress.org repository, including “wp”, “WordPress”, or “plugin” in the name is no longer permitted.
Thomas Scholz – 23.01.2013 18:08
Wow, cool. Thanks. :)
Monika T-S – 15.04.2013 11:35
this is an absolute simple strategy to safe “WP” for Auttomatic or the foundation or the new market place on wp_org.
And after millions of miles it is a better way to find the right plugin in the repository.
“wp plugin for… ” is a searchkey for millions of users.
And now I agree with Ralf, I have to rename every plugin. :(
Tom J Nowell – 23.01.2013 18:30
At last! It’s just a shame it can’t be applied retrospectively without issues
Ralf – 23.03.2013 19:14
If you download the zip-file instead installing the plugin in the backend, it should be clear what the content of the zip-file is. The filename is a very good place to put this information into.
Without the prefix ‘wp_’, or the words ‘wordpress’/'plugin’, it becomes hard to determine what the content of ‘some_awesome_thing.zip’ really is. Is it a plugin for WordPress or one for another cms? Or is it a theme? Or something completly different?
Downloading plugins from the official repo without renaming it is now a bad idea.