Ten tips in ten minutes for a successful plugin — WordCamp Torino 2018

Ten pieces of advice from six years of building and maintaining a widely used plugin — and almost none of them are about writing code.

WordCamp Torino 2018 logo

I gave this talk at WordCamp Torino 2018 in Turin, Italy, in Italian (original title: 10 consigli in 10 minuti per un plugin di successo).

A ten-minute lightning talk with a simple premise: making a successful WordPress plugin is not only a programming problem. By then I had spent more than six years building and maintaining one, and most of the lessons had nothing to do with PHP.

So: ten tips, one minute each, drawn from what actually moved the needle — and from the mistakes that cost us time.

The themes

  • Picking a problem narrow enough to solve properly and common enough to matter
  • Documentation and the readme as product surface, not an afterthought
  • Support as a feedback channel: what users report tells you what to build next
  • Releases, compatibility and the discipline of not breaking people’s sites
  • Reputation in the repository, and how slowly it is earned

Slides and recording