[wp-hackers] How to rename plugins in the plugin repository?

[Otto]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Raj <list at expost.org> wrote:
> Thank you piyush and Eric,
>
> I agree that hard coding directory names is a bad practice. I started working on this plugin a little over a year ago when I was something of a wordpress API newbie so I did what worked :)
>
> All of the emails that my plugin sends to email subscribers have URLs that lead directly to the plugin files. Like this:
>
> http://www.youriste.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-responder-email-autoresponder-and-newsletter-plugin/confirm.php?p=[some_10_character_string_identifies_subscriber]
>
> Many email providers, especially Gmail, strip out URLs in emails that are too long. As you can see the biggest offender is the plugin's directory name which is unnecessarily long. So it is becoming a problem for the users of the plugin.
>
> Obviously I will have to change the plugin such that it doesn't link directly to one of the plugin files. But now....as of day 5 after submitting to wp extend directory the plugin has had around 610 downloads which I think is pretty impressive. It's really painful to think about all those people having installed the plugin and not many of them being able to use this plugin reliably. I need to solve this problem ASAP.
>
> Please help.

You should rework that to use a URL that goes to the root of the
installation instead, using a custom query variable.

Instead of linking to the confirm.php file, do something like this:

add_action('init','my_init');
function my_init() {
	// check for my special variable name
	if(isset($_GET['confirm_email'])) {
		include ('confirm.php);
		die;
	}
}

Then link to http://example.com/?confirm_email=whatever. Your main
plugin will notice this on init, then can include the confirm.php file
to do the work, then die off gracefully (or redirect, or whatever is
appropriate).

-Otto