[wp-hackers] Plugin code quality and best practice robot

[Simon Dunton - WP Sites]

Hi,

This is just an idea I had this morning that I thought I would put out there.

I've recently been running WordPress with the codebase symlinked and the wp-content folder in the directory above the WordPress core files. This is causing problems with a number of plugins because they assume the plugin folder will be site.com/wp-content/plugins. As most of you will probably know, it's perfectly valid to have your wp-content, plugins, themes or uploads directory where ever you want providing you set the correct constants.

I'm guessing this is a common issue that a sizeable percentage of .org plugins suffer from. So I thought how about creating a robot to go through all of the wp.org plugins and check for dodgy code like this. It could also check the plugin doesn't generate any notices/errors by running it on a site with error reporting on.

The robot could then post a quick support question to the plugin author to tell them paths need to be created this way and point them to the correct page in the codex and the same with any other coding issues.

What would WordPress.org think about a robot downloading plugins and posting to the support forum section for that plugin? maybe one every couple of seconds.

Is there anything else quality or best practice wise that this robot could detect and inform plugin authors of?


Simon 

WP Sites Ltd