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WPBeginner» Blog» Plugins» How to Add Your Plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory

How to Add Your Plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory

Last updated on June 22nd, 2012 by Editorial Staff
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How to Add Your Plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory

One of the reason why WordPress is such an amazing platform to work with is because of all the plugins that are available. Contributing useful plugins to the repository is just one of the ways you can give back to the community. One of the reason why some developers do not submit plugins in the directory is because they do not know how to do so. In this article, we will discuss the benefits of adding your plugin to the WordPress plugin directory along with the step by step guide on how to add your plugin to the repository.

For those who do not have the coding knowledge to contribute back to the community, you can always help rate plugins and vote on compatibility check.

The first step to adding your plugin is probably the HARDEST step of the process. That is creating a plugin. Here is a good list of tutorials on How to Create a WordPress Plugin. Once you have done this, it does not take long to add your plugin to the WordPress plugin directory. But you are probably wondering why should you spend your time adding your plugin to the WordPress directory?

Benefits of Adding Your Plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory

  • Basic Statistics – By uploading your plugin, you can keep track of how many people have downloaded your plugin.
  • Feedback – You will get feedback for your plugin because people will leave comments. These may be bug reports, new ideas on how to improve your plugins etc.
  • Exposure – WordPress plugin directory is visited daily. People access it through their admin panels. So it is a lot of exposure for developers. You will get new users to your site, new clients, and some change in your paypal for donation as well.
  • Easy to Upgrade – Normally when you release plugins through your site, it is very hard to release new upgrades and notify all users. With SVN, WordPress Plugin directory lets you do that.
  • Credibility and Authority – If you have a plugin in the official repository, clients see you as a credible developer. People generally have higher trust tendency for plugins that are in the repository.

Ready to get started? Well there are some household rules just to keep everything nice and smooth.

  1. Your plugin MUST be GPLv2 Compatible.
  2. The plugin most not do anything illegal (this will be determined by the review team).
  3. The plugin must not embed external links on the public site (like a “powered by” link) without explicitly asking the user’s permission.

Ok, now lets get started with the process.

First you need to submit your plugin and wait for approval. Yes, to do this you will need to have a WordPress.org account, but if you are thinking about adding your own plugin, then you probably have an account there already. It can take up to a few days to get your plugin approved sometimes. Our plugin got approved within a matter of few hours. So it really depends on how soon someone in the review team can take a look at your plugin. Aside from having the actual plugin ready, you need to have a readme.txt file ready which can help your submission status.

Creating a readme.txt file for your Plugin

WordPress has a readme.txt Standards which we recommend that you copy and save it in the same folder as your plugin. Then start making the tweaks which we will guide you through the process.

First lets cover the basics such as plugin name, author, stable versions etc.

=== Plugin Name ===

Contributors: Your WordPress.org Username
Plugin Name: Your Plugin Name Will Go Here
Plugin URI: Plugins Web Page URL
Tags: Tags for the Plugin
Author URI: https://www.wpbeginner.com/
Author: WPBeginner
Donate link: https://www.wpbeginner.com/wpbeginner-needs-your-help/
Requires at least: Minimum requires WordPress version
Tested up to: The latest version you tested it with
Stable tag: Plugin’s stable version
Version: Current Plugin’s version

Now let’s focus on all the other information:

== Description ==

== Installation ==

== Upgrade Notice ==

== Screenshots ==

== Changelog ==

== Frequently Asked Questions ==

== Donations ==

Make sure you refer to the standard file to see how to add unordered lists, ordered lists etc. Once you have completed the readme.txt file, then run it through the official validator.

If you get approved, you will get the notification in your email. Beware, sometimes the email might hit your SPAM box (so keep a look out for that). Once your plugin is approved, now you will need to use SVN to upload the plugin. You can use the normal Terminal Prompt or Command Prompt to upload files via SVN, but it is a lot easier for new developers to use a visual interface like Tortoise (for Windows) and Versions (for Mac). In our example, we will show the example of uploading via SVN using Tortoise.

Before we get started with that, it is important to understand the structure of folders:

You need to create a main folder which you can call anything. In our case, we are calling it “facebook-open-graph-meta-in-wordpress” because that is the name of our plugin. Inside that folder, you will need to have three sub-folders called “branches”, “tags”, and “trunk”. The branches folder is used to release major updates, tags folder is used to release minor updates, and trunk is the beta version where you play with the new features. This allows users to revert to the older version of the plugin, if they see bugs in the newer version.

You need to put your plugin’s current version inside the trunk folder. There is no need to zip the files because it will be done automatically when you upload it. Use the link you were sent to in your email, and connect using the Tortoise software.

Tortoise SVN

When it asks for login credentials, you will need to enter your WordPress.org username and password. Now every time you need to make a new change, simply right click on the folder and click commit change.

SVN Commit

While the process may look very difficult, it is very easy once you do it. It does not take a long time. After you hit commit changes, they are applied on the next 15 minute interval. We hope that this will help you when you are ready to submit your own plugin. WordPress has a good recommendation links to SVN guide which are of a lot of help. Feel free to let us know if have any better suggestions, or tips for new users.

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13 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Jindo Nguyen says:
    Mar 9, 2018 at 9:31 am

    Thank you !.
    You helped me solve the issue when uploading my first plugin. Your guide really easier than using the command line.
    This is my new plugin which approval some months ago based on your article.

    Reply
  2. Mo a says:
    Oct 10, 2017 at 6:10 pm

    What happens after the plugin is uploaded for the first time? How long should I expect to wait before I can find it on WordPress.org and download it directly via the WordPress plugin search?

    Thank you for a great article!

    Reply
  3. Ralph says:
    Mar 27, 2016 at 12:38 pm

    When trying to upload my plugin files via Tortoise’s SVN Commit option, the commit was blocked because of the following error: “Please provide the commit message that describes the changes you are making.”

    It was easily fixed by entering “First commit.” in the “Message” box (below the “Recent messages” button) of the Commit dialog.

    Thanks for the tutorial!

    Reply
  4. Parth says:
    Jun 24, 2015 at 11:06 pm

    I have created wordpress plugin

    I want to host it into wordpress.org

    Can anyone let me know what should be the value of license?

    I want to make it free

    What should i write in licese for readme.text file

    Reply
    • WPBeginner Support says:
      Jun 26, 2015 at 11:55 pm

      You can add these two lines to the header of your plugin’s readme.txt file

      License: GPLv2 or later
      License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
      
      Reply
    • Ralph says:
      Mar 27, 2016 at 12:25 pm

      I simply left the license line out of the readme file… WP will then assume your plugin is licensed under the default GPLv2 license, which is fine in most cases.

      Reply
  5. mihir says:
    Dec 1, 2013 at 10:30 am

    Hi i tried to checkout and getting errors which i mentioned in this Q – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20313760/unable-to-connect-to-wordpress-repository-url-by-tortoise-svn please help.

    Reply
  6. Haseeb Ahmad Ayazi says:
    Mar 29, 2013 at 6:40 am

    A very well-explained post for those who are newbies in wp development like me .

    Reply
  7. Keely says:
    Nov 23, 2012 at 1:53 am

    Wish I could find a SIMPLE tutorial on this – nobody seems to want to explain it REALLY SIMPLY. I hate getting irritated when I’m doing something new.

    Reply
  8. wpbeginner says:
    Aug 19, 2011 at 10:16 am

    @mrahmadawais When it is your first time, then you will SVN all folders…. tags, trunk, branches….

    But once that is done, you only need to commit the changes that are needed.

    Reply
  9. mrahmadawais says:
    Aug 19, 2011 at 1:35 am

    @jdblundell can you tell me a bit

    Reply
  10. mrahmadawais says:
    Aug 19, 2011 at 1:35 am

    can someone elaborate me the last step? when we upload through svn ? what should we upload which folder?

    Reply
  11. jdblundell says:
    Jun 2, 2011 at 9:15 pm

    Thanks for this! I had one dickens of a time trying to upload my plugin (http://casadeblundell.com/jonathan/wordpress/) originally and after I upgraded it last I haven’t been able to post the latest version.

    I’ll have to walk through this and see what I’m missing – although the only real change is that the plugin works with the latest WordPress version.

    Reply

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