On Saturday, Matt posted to the WordPress Blog that the plugin directory has been refreshed.

Also also posted to our new P2 at make.wordpress.org/plugins: what this means for developers. @otto42, @coffee2code, and I go through the changes in detail. They include:

• The new Developers and Support tabs for plugins
• Subscribing to commit emails (Hint: see the Developers tab)
• Following and managing support threads
• How the new support statics are calculated

(Sidebar: We hope to use make.wordpress.org/plugins for announcements and resources for plugin developers. This blog will also move to make.wordpress.org soon. More to come.)

We’re seeing increased reports in readme.txt files not updating for plugins. Likely related to the migration to nginx from earlier this week, as in the process a number of configurations were updated (also PHP 5.2 to 5.3), and now signs point to memcached caching algorithms (riveting). @bazza is looking into the problem; @otto42 and I are also looking into some wider issues.

Been giving a lot of thought to how to give plugin authors more control over their plugin pages. In WordPress custom headers have been hugely beneficial in people’s ability to make a theme their own without having to be a designer. (And designers can make them really sing.)

As an experiment we’ve turned on custom headers for the plugin directory. If you’d like to try out this feature:

1. Make a 772×250 pixel jpeg or png. (No animated GIFs. )
2. Check it in to your plugin’s SVN directory with the path assets/banner-772x250.(jpg|png). Note that the assets directory is added to your plugin’s root directory, not trunk.
3. On the next plugin directory refresh (every 15 minutes or so) you should see your image start showing up on the page.

For an example of this in action, check out Hello Dolly, natch. Our goal is to mainly see how people use them, so if you try this out leave comment below with a link to your plugin!

Final note: this is just an experiment, and there is a 98.254% chance the dimensions, placement, and text overlay for this header will change in the future, or the idea might not work at all. But I think it’s a nice toe in the water for letting authors really make their plugin pages shine.

Core Team Meetup Recap – Part II

Picking up where we left off….

Friday

We kicked off Friday with a discussion about the high-level roadmap for 2012. Using our earlier talk about process and scope, we identified areas/userflows that we could use to focus a release. Areas of interest included changing themes/customizing your site, uploading a bunch of photos, interacting with audience/feedback loop. (There were more, but let’s face it, there are too many things we’d like to improve to do them all at once.)

We all donned WordPress gear so that people would recognize us at the happy hour later.

Dion (dd32) modeling the latest swag

Dion and Andrew Ozz before lunch

Lunch: Went to The Sentient Bean in Savannah.

The Sentient Bean

Back patio at the Sentient Bean

Koop and Mark, Dion and Ozz in the background

Next we went to ThincSavannah, my coworking space in downtown Savannah. We did the livestreamed Town Hall/Q&A (recording coming soon), answering questions from that forum thread I put up last week and a few that came in live from IRC.

Core team town hall

After that was happy hour at Jazz’d. Only two people came to hang out with us (and to think we dressed up especially!), but they were two great people, so we were fine. Some drinks and appetizers later, we departed for WordPress on Ice, in which we went ice skating at the Civic Center.

Nacin and Koop on skates

WordPress on Ice! Nacin, Mark, Jane, Matt, Jon, Daryl

Then a stop at Huc-a-Poo’s, then home.

Saturday

We spent the morning talking about mobile apps and their place in the WordPress ecosystem, as well as making the dashboard a better experience when viewed in a mobile browser.

Lunch: Went to AJ’s and ate on the deck. Continued talking about mobile. This eventually morphed a bit into a discussion about the lines between .org/.com.

Core team at lunch at AJ's Dockside

After lunch we talked about the default theme for 2012, including what it should do/be that our current themes don’t already accomplish, and the process for its creation. Breakouts followed. One was focused on multisite, while the other was focused on hosting/diagnostics/health check. We tested doing a Google Hangout with screensharing as a way to collaborate more effectively throughout the year, and agreed we would try to do them once a month. For dinner we got takeout BBQ from Gerald’s Pig & Shrimp. We pretended @ryan was with us by playing a video of him from last year’s meetup. Afterward, Koop gave a primer on JavaScript.

Sunday

When we started this morning, we tried to at least quickly hit the things we hadn’t gotten to yet, since today was the last day. These included: Google stuff, core plugins, how leadership in core does/does not translate to leadership of the whole project, wordpress.org site, pairs (creating process to make collaborative/non-solo development the norm), and CMS stuff.

Since a lot of us were pretty interested in making the theme customization process a focus of the next release, we starting identifying what the chunks of that might look like under the new process and with people working in pairs/teams. We continued talking about this over brunch at the Tybee Island Social Club, where @nacin and @dkoopersmith drank bacon bloody marys.

Bacon Bloody Mary

Should Nacin eat the bacon or drink the bloody mary? He can't decide.

After brunch, @markjaquith and @dd32 left for the airport, and @joncave and @azaozz left two hours later. Bye bye, core team!

Now we begin a 2nd mini meetup. Matt, Nacin, Koop, and I are staying, and have been joined by @otto42 and @chexee. The next couple of days we’ll be doing some planning and starting projects to make visiting wordpress.org a better, more useful experience.  Tonight, though, everyone is catching up on some individual work after a week of long days.

We’ll post summaries of the specific core meetup discussions over the coming week.

Having the same problem with searching for themes we used to have with searhing for plugins.. exact name match shows up late in list. Ex, Twenty Eleven shows up 7th in an exact search. @otto42, can you work the magic you used to fix this for plugins to fix it for theme search?

@otto42: in theme repo on .org, search results for “Twenty Ten” put Twenty Ten as result #6. Higher results are Freedream2010, 2010 Weaver, Third Style, Clear Style, and Atmosphere 2010. Can you do some magic so exact matches come up first?

New and improved this morning, we have a two-fer.

First, on the extend plugin directory, you may notice some new pie chart fun on the stats tab for each plugin. This shows a percentage breakdown of the versions being actively used by that plugin’s users. Only slices greater than 1.0% are shown.

Secondly, since data kept in a box is not very useful, there’s a new API for getting this data. Usage is fairly obvious from just a simple example, which gets the version breakdown of one of my own plugins:

http://api.wordpress.org/stats/plugin/1.0/simple-facebook-connect?callback=demo

The callback parameter is optional, of course, and provided for people who want JSONP usage.

Note that the version data is relatively new, so we don’t have it for all plugins at present. It will get better as reporting continues. For those interested, it’s saving the total counts of the version numbers as reported by the plugin update-checks over the last week. Since the data at present is only from one day, it’s not very accurate.

New for Extend/Plugins:

If a user clicks the “Broken” link, it will record the click as usual, but now also redirect them to the start a new topic support form, and nicely ask them to leave a new topic explaining what’s broken. Hopefully, this will make the broken button more useful.

Note: if you want to test this, feel free, but realize that you’re marking the plugin as broken by doing so, whether you leave a new topic or not. So please, go back afterwards and change your vote to “works” if it really does work.