Title: Plugin Directory
Author: Matt Mullenweg
Published: March 15, 2007
Last modified: June 4, 2021

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March 15, 2007

 By

[Matt Mullenweg](https://profiles.wordpress.org/matt/)

 in

[Meta](https://wordpress.org/news/category/meta/)

# Plugin Directory

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One of the greatest things about WordPress has always been the amazing number of
high-quality plugins available for the platform. I believe that there aren’t any
more “killer features” in software, there are 10,000 killer features and everyone
has a different 20. If we tried to put everything into WordPress the result would
be, for lack of a better term, bloated. However through our robust plugin API people
have used WordPress as a platform for building almost anything you can imagine leveraging
the huge WP userbase and scalable core codebase.

That’s all fine and dandy, but having all these plugins isn’t that useful if you’ve
got no place to find them. Even though we have provided development hosting at [wp-plugins.org](http://wp-plugins.org)
for years, we hadn’t had a user interface to the plugins hosted there, which I think
was a travesty.

No longer! Our ever-expanding “extend” section [now has a brand-spanking new plugins directory](https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/)
where you can browse, download, rate, and comment on all your favorite plugins. 
I highly encourage you to go check it out.

For users, this means:

 * There is now a [central place to find and download WordPress plugins](https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/).
 * You can get a much better idea about plugin quality and compatibility from the
   site.
 * In the future you’ll be able to get notification inside of WordPress about plugins
   you use that have updates.

For developers, you now have:

 * Exposure to the millions of people who visit WordPress.org every month.
 * Free SVN hosting for GPL plugin development at wp-plugins.org. (Like always.)
 * Automatic download packages and free hosting of those.
 * Statistics about how many people are using and downloading your plugins.
 * Prominent links to your homepage, and the ability to specify a Paypal donation
   link from your plugin page.

As a developer all you need to do to start taking advantage of the new plugin pages
is to include a [properly formatted readme.txt file](https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about/)
along with your plugin.

Props to [Michael Adams](http://blogwaffe.com/), [Mark Jaquith](http://txfx.net/),
and [Matt Thomas](http://iammattthomas.com/) for making this dream a reality. We
hope you all enjoy it and if you have any feedback blog it and [link back to this entry](https://wordpress.org/development/2007/03/plugin-directory/)
so we get the pingback. Happy downloading!

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