How to get feedback from your anonymous plugin user at wordpress.org

Shashikant Y — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 10:55:08 +0000

If you are a WordPress plugin developer who shares their plugins on wordpress.org and you are not getting feedback from your anonymous users, then this article just meant for you.

Most of the early stage developers do not integrate a legitimate link to ask the users for feedback. I am an experienced WordPress developer still I also made the same mistake ;)

Wordpress.org does not give you any data regarding the users for your plugin. So it becomes a bit tuff to ask the users for feedback, and seeing other plugins 100s of feedback on the platform gets you a sense of jealousy. And you start wondering why the hell I'm the only one who is not getting the feedback on the platform.

If this is the case, then I feel there are only two possible reasons - 1. Your plugin is just crap 2. You didn't have any inbuilt option in your plugin to drive your users to the feedback section.

In this article, I will share how to edit the WordPress footer text "Thank you for creating with WordPress." and use it as your feedback drive channel.

To edit the message, you can use this filter admin_footer_text.

/**
 * Add feedback message in WordPress dashboard footer area.
 *
 * @param string $text WordPress footer text.
 * 
 * @return string 
 */
function kantbtrue_wp_footer_msg( $text ) {
    /* Translators: 1. The plugin name */
    $text = sprintf(
        __( 'Thank you for installing <strong>%1$s</strong>.', 'textdomain' ),
        'plugin name'
    );
    return $text;
}
add_filter( 'admin_footer_text', 'kantbtrue_wp_footer_msg' );

Resource

WordPress Codex

WordPress plugin action links - thorough notes

Shashikant Y — Thu, 01 Oct 2020 16:11:01 +0000

Recently I have released a simple light-weight plugin on WordPress.org to add color to the taxonomies. While working on the plugin, I was thinking of the past me who don't know much about the WordPress plugin development's best practices.

If you are an aspiring WP plugin developer, then this post may help you to understand one of the most important things, that is action links.

What are action links?

WordPress plugin action links (i.e., activate, deactivate, delete) are those links that are visible under each plugin on the plugin page.

Purpose of the action links?

Plugin action links are a useful way to provide helpful links to your plugin users like contact, support, or settings page.

One good point about the action link is, it will only be visible when your plugin is active. So, no worry about the visibility of links when your plugin isn't active.

How can I add my own action links?

The plugin_action_links_{$plugin_file} filter is responsible for adding action links where $plugin_file referes to the path of plugin file.

if ( ! function_exists( 'kantbtrue_action_links' ) ) {
    /**
     * Filters the list of action links displayed for a specific plugin in the Plugins list table
     * 
     * @param array $actions An array of plugin action links.
     */
    function add_action_links ( $actions ) {
        $links = array(
            '<a href="' . admin_url( 'admin.php?page=kbt_settings' ) . '">Settings</a>',
        );
        return array_merge( $actions, $links );
    }
}
add_filter( 'plugin_action_links_' . plugin_basename( __FILE__ ), 'kantbtrue_action_links' );