WordPress Plugin Compatibility feature

One of the most important reasons people give for not upgrading to the latest version of WordPress is fear that their WP plugins won’t be compatible with the last update of WP. As part of the continuing efforts to make WordPress core, plugin, and theme upgrades as painless as possible, Michael Adams developed and launched a beta version of a new Compatibility Plugin feature in the WP plugin directory, powered by user generated votes.

When you check a plugin in the directory, select a WordPress version and a plugin version from the drop-down menu. If there has been feedback about this WordPress and plugin version combination, you will see what percentage of responses marked that combination as compatible and how many marked it as incompatible. Then you can decide if you want to upgrade or not.

Also, if you log in in the directory, you will be able to help the community to gather information! Just select a WordPress version and plugin version combination and click the “Works” or the “Broken” button. Please note that this shouldn’t be used to report minor issues with a plugin. You should mark a plugin as “Broken” only if its core functionality is really broken when run on the selected WordPress version.

Right now the feature is in information gathering mode. So get out there and vote! Don’t just vote on broken plugins, but cast a “Works” vote for every plugin that works on the version of WordPress you are using. This can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our data and prevent a few mistaken “Broken” votes from weighing too heavily.

For developers, they are now including this data in the API. The plugin_information action now returns a “compatibility” member with the multidimensional array format:

array( {WP version} => array( {plugin version} => array( {% of reporters who say it works}, {# responses} ) ) )

If the API knows which version of WordPress you are using (for example, if you are making this query using the plugins_api() function from with WordPress), the API will only return compatibility information for your version of WordPress.

Eventually, they want to gather this compatibility feedback from within WordPress, allowing you to vote directly from your plugins admin screen. The ultimate goal is to use this information to inform you of plugin incompatibilities with a new version of WordPress during the upgrade process. For that to be useful they need a large set of high quality compatibility data. Start voting now!

More information here.

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