Publishing a Plugin to the WordPress Plugin Directory

In 2001, a blog tool called b2/cafelog was launched by Michel Valdrighi. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little forked b2/cafelog and created WordPress in 2003. According to WordPress.org, “WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL”. In 2004, plugins were introduced to extend WordPress’ core functionality. Here’s what the WordPress Plugin Directory looked like in November 2004:

Source: http://ift.tt/1Q8hzVE

At that point in 2004, there were 46 plugins available for WordPress. In just under eleven years, there are now over 42,697 plugins available in the WordPress Plugin Directory and there have been over 1,161,033,914 plugin downloads. Here’s what the WordPress Plugin Directory looks like in January 2016:

All of the plugins that appear in the WordPress Plugin Directory are free to use and distribute. They are licensed under the General Public License (GPL). Many pioneers have published plugins in the WordPress Plugin Directory and my brother and I wanted to be a part of this exclusive club. We’ll give you an inside look at the WordPress Plugin Directory submission process by sharing our experience on deciding to create, creating, and publishing a plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory. We'll also provide step-by-step instructions on how to add your plugin to WordPress’ central Subversion repository for both Mac and Windows users.

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by Ben Shadle via SitePoint