Hey, I like your idea.<p>I'm not accepting clients, so this is not a plug, I'm just saying this to frame where I am coming from. I do audits and WordPress code reviews for folks like junior college districts and largish content marketing sites; these range from load-testing and auditing the servers to examining the code quality of custom plugins and themes. I also do a lot of one-off and custom WP work for similar levels of clients.<p>Here's one element that you might find useful that I wasn't seeing in your reviews and that I don't see in a lot of reviews (because it's a pain in the butt to do the work to uncover):<p>looking at the hooks/ expandability of the plugin.<p>Like, you might audit the actual code quality and see how easy you think it might be to accomplish various customizations without, say, forking the plug.<p>I'm always surprised at the variability on this point among various plugins. Some plugins are filtering all kinds of things, some don't filter much at all. Some have really flexible and easy to modify CPTs, some have a ton of functionality hard coded. Some things have really baroque systems that would be easy to expand, but they are written using some crazy complicated architecture and you have to do hours of reading code to understand what you'd want to do.<p>A second thing that you might look at is the nature of "paid-ness" of the plugins. There is one business listing plugin (which I hate writing extensions for) that basically breaks the site if you don't re-up the subscription every year. There are other plugins that play nice-- you buy them once, and they work everywhere just fine and if they release a new major version you can buy it again. I don't like paid-for commercial stuff in GPL, but that's at least reasonable. What isn't reasonable are licensing schemes that do things like break local/staging/test/prod environments because the license is tied to some crazy thing like the URL.<p>Anyhow, it's a pretty site, so I wish you well.
Plugin developer here. Just had a look at some of the review... they are in no way in-depth.<p>I would call them plugin descriptions at best, but not reviews. Each of the bigger plugins like Gravity Forms or Advanced Custom Fields has so much functionality under the hood that I feel you're not even touching the surface.<p>Again, good and possibly useful description of each plugin, but they are not in-depth reviews.
Hey folks I write in-depth Wordpress Plugin reviews. So if you're on the ledge about buying or installing a particular plugin you can check out my reviews.<p>I keep this in mind while reviewing plugins:<p>- Functionality of the plugin<p>- Any security issue the plugin has<p>- Support offered by the devs as well as the pricing<p>- Any weird gotchas or unexpected behavior with other plugins<p>Recently I posted an in-depth review of Carbon Fields and ACF.<p>Let me know what you think about it!
This is great. One piece of feedback, about the reviews themselves: Every time you use parentheses, there’s no space between the preceding word and the opening paren(like this).<p>I only read through the ACF review, but I saw it a number of times there.
Good on you for this contribution. Plugins can be a liability in so many ways. I remember almost a decade ago, a favorite plugin of my clients' was sold by the original dev to a third party. From that day on the quality of support and release schedule both took a dive, and soon after we started receiving telecommunications product spam from the new vendor. Like telephony solutions, which were completely unrelated to the plugin.<p>After having spent hundreds of hours customizing that plugin, this was a devastating experience. I'm still leery of plugins and rarely install anything that could leave me stranded if it went unsupported one day.
Cool site! I recently made a plugin to turn WordPress into an academic labbook and found that the ecosystem is so, so full of absolute rubbish. If a plugin isn't immediately and continuously bugging you to buy the pro version, it's modifying core WordPress look and feel (either admin or public facing pages, or both) in such a fundamental way that it is an eyesore. No, I don't want your crappy little plugin with grammar and spelling mistakes to have its own top level menu on the admin dashboard.<p>In my plugin therefore tried to do things properly and avoid changing too much core functionality. It would be great if your site could review plugins on that sort of criteria.<p>My plugin (basically finished but not fully tested)) for anyone that's interested: <a href="https://github.com/SeanDS/alp" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SeanDS/alp</a>
Very useful. It may help to be explicit about relationships with the makers. Something like a blanket statement of “I don’t get paid for writing reviews and don’t accet sponsorships” or “I review on request if the makers but don’t charge them for it.”<p>It could also help to know the spread. Why % are 4 stars? 5?
Looks good for the most part. That said, I do feel like you should maybe go into a bit more depth about certain things, like how quick/detailed support responses are (if possible), the quality of the code itself, the viability of the pricing schemes, etc.<p>But that's just my opinion here.
If you're anything like me this may have been inspired by some plugins you absolutely hate. My advice would be to get a couple of 1 star reviews up, knowing which to avoid is maybe more powerful than the plugins to install! Keep up the good work :)