Most plugins will be licensed under the GPL. It's the easiest licensing choice and offers no conflicts with WordPress because WordPress is licensed under the GPL.

Although the GPL is the license generally used by most developers in the community, alternative options are available to you that do not conflict with the GPL or the ideals of open source software. These licenses are GPL-compatible licenses. If you choose to do so, you may license your plugin under one of these licenses.

The GNU site keeps a list of GPL-compatible licenses that you may use for your plugins: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html. Some of the more popular licenses include:

Although these are popular open-source licenses, you won't find many WordPress plugins licensed under them. Most will be licensed under a version of the GPL. However, you do have alternatives available to you that are non-GPL but compatible. You should also choose a license that best represents your plugin.

Plugins may also be dual- or split-licensed.

All plugins submitted to the WordPress.org plugin repository (described later in this chapter) must be licensed completely under a GPL-compatible license. You cannot use any license that is not compatible with the GPL, even if it's legal to do so. This is simply the WordPress.org site's policy on plugin submission.

WordPress has always been a piece of software that's representative of user freedom. WordPress wouldn't exist if the original software weren't licensed under the GPL, which enabled it to be forked into the software that it is today. The goal is to not restrict what users can do with the software when they receive it. It's about granting users freedom. They should be able to modify, copy, and share the software with others without restriction.

If you plan to create a plugin for WordPress and want to place additional restrictions on how your plugin or its code can be used, WordPress is likely not the best platform to develop on top of. The GPL license WordPress is placed under is meant to remove restrictions on how the user can use the software.

None of the authors of this book are legal professionals, so the purpose of this book is not to give you legal advice about licensing your plugin. However, if you decide to use a GPL-incompatible license, you may be setting yourself up for legal issues.

Aside from any legal implications, licensing your work under a GPL-incompatible license is one of the worst things you can do for good publicity for your work in the WordPress community. At best, your plugin won't be allowed within official channels. At worst, you and your work might be looked upon as outcasts within the community. Neither of these things is desirable when trying to market your plugin.

The biggest benefits of licensing your plugins under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license follow:

Perhaps most important for marketing is the last point. To get your plugin work out there, it's best to be accepted by the community. If you want your work to be known, arguing licensing issues with the people who work on and improve WordPress every day is probably not the best route to take.

Even if you don't agree with the opinions of others, the WordPress philosophy, or the license, you should respect it. It's important that you not alienate yourself by not respecting the people who have contributed code to WordPress (the copyright holders).

WordPress and any work licensed under a GPL-compatible license are referred to as free software. The term "free" here refers to user free dom. It does not mean that your plugins cannot cost money. You can charge a fee for transferring the plugin to others or charge money for client work. You can even build an entire business around open source, free, code if you choose to go that route with your plugin work. You are not restricted from building a business on top of WordPress. Many developers have extremely successful businesses that align perfectly with the GPL license.

The license WordPress uses is about the distribution of code. One of the largest misconceptions about the GPL is that it's not good for client or private work. Many potential clients and businesses don't understand that this is not an issue. Because the license comes into effect only at the moment of distribution, the license of the work isn't relevant because you're not distributing it. You're not required to release work you do for clients under a GPL-compatible license. You can assure your clients that any work you do for them won't be released elsewhere.

Anyone with a user account at WordPress.org can submit plugins and use many other features of the Web site. Even if not hosting your plugins on the site, you'll want to have an account there. This can provide you with many useful tools.

Registering a new account is easy and takes only a few simple steps. After you set up a new account, you can submit plugins to the official repository.

Before being allowed to host your plugin on the plugin repository, you must submit your plugin idea for approval. This process is painless, and plugins are typically approved within a few days, sometimes even within a few hours of submission.

As shown in Figure 17-2, you must submit a plugin name, description, and URL (optional) to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add.

After you submit your plugin, your plugin gets a new page specifically for it on the repository at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/plugin-name where plugin-name is the plugin's folder name. This is the permanent link to your plugin on the repository, which is where users can read about and download the plugin.

Figure 17.2. FIGURE 17-2

All plugins on the WordPress plugin repository are hosted on a Subversion repository, which is a version control system. You need to learn how to use Subversion to add and update your plugin files on the plugin repository.

You can find a brief introduction to using Subversion on the site at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about/svn, which should give you enough of an understanding of using Subversion for the repository. However, it's all done via the command line. Most plugin developers use a Subversion client to check out (get plugin files) or commit (add or update plugin files). Subversion clients provide easy-to-use interfaces for using Subversion.

Numerous Subversion clients are available for different operating systems. Two of the most popular Subversion clients for Windows and Mac are listed here, but you can experiment with other clients and find the tool that suits you best.

The purpose of this section isn't to teach you how to use Subversion. There's a freely available Subversion book available online for learning how to use it at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/nightly/en/index.html. Learning at least the basics of Subversion is something you need to do to host your plugin on the repository.

All plugins on the repository are given a unique Subversion URL: http://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/plugin-name, where plugin-name is the name of the plugin folder. You will have access to that specific directory in the repository. To add and update files and folders with your preferred Subversion client, you need to use your WordPress.org username and password for authentication.

Plugins on the WordPress plugin repository are required to have a readme.txt file included in the plugin's top-level directory. The repository loads information from this file to build the plugin's page in the repository. This is the information provided to the public, so you want it to be informative and useful for potential users.

The readme.txt file creates the sections for the plugin, as shown in Figure 17-3.

Figure 17.3. FIGURE 17-3

Your plugin's readme.txt file needs to be submitted using Markdown syntax. Markdown is a tool for converting text to HTML on the Web and uses specific markup. You can learn how to use the syntax on the Markdown project page at http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax.

Following is an example readme.txt file for plugins, which you can modify for your plugins.

=== Example Plugin Name ===
Contributors: username
Donate link: http://example.com
Tags: example, example-2, example-3
Requires at least: 3.0
Tested up to: 3.1
Stable tag: 1.0
Write a short plugin description no longer than 150 characters.
== Description ==
Write a long description of the plugin. Shown on the main plugin page.
== Installation ==
Provide installation instructions for the plugin.
== Frequently Asked Questions ==
= Example question? =
An answer to the example question.
== Screenshots ==
1. Screenshot caption for screenshot-1.png.
2. Screenshot caption for screenshot-2.png.
== Changelog ==
= Version 1.0 =
* Change since previous version.
* Another change since previous version.
* One more change since previous version.
== Extra ==
Provide an extra section(s) if needed for your plugin.

Code snippet readme.txt

The most important section of the readme.txt file is the first section of the file, which is where you add your plugin information.

=== Example Plugin Name ===
Contributors: username
Donate link: http://example.com
Tags: example, example-2, example-3

Requires at least: 3.0
Tested up to: 3.1
Stable tag: 1.0

The first line should be your plugin's name. Each of the following lines have specific meanings that you need to make sure are correct.

Naming your plugin can be one of the toughest parts of the process to create a plugin. There are no definite rules to naming a plugin, but you can follow some general guidelines to choose a name.

A great plugin name can help your plugin in many ways when you start with developing plugins. If you, your company, or your work is not widely known, use this opportunity to create a great name to help put your work on the map.

If you do not have a personal blog or Web site, you're missing out on one the easiest promotional methods available. Your site should also be running on WordPress. Yes, there are sites that provide WordPress work while running a different content management system. Running your site on something other than WordPress does little to help the legitimacy of your work. You can't expect users to trust that you're creating quality WordPress plugins if you're not using WordPress for your own site.

Creating a Page or Site for All Your Plugins

With your own site, you can create a page that showcases all your plugins. You'll be in control of how they're presented to the world from one central location. Some things you can do to present plugins on your plugins page include the following:

• Listing plugin names and descriptions with links to their individual plugin pages.

• Showing thumbnail images or screenshots from your plugins.

• Creating a catchy welcome/intro message on why using one of your plugins would be beneficial.

You can also set up an entire site dedicated to a single plugin or all your plugins. One of the best Web site examples you'll see dedicated to a plugin is the Gravity Forms site (http://www.gravityforms.com) as shown in Figure 17-4. The front page features eye-catching screenshots while providing useful information to the visitor.

Figure 17.4. FIGURE 17-4

You've covered how to set up a page for your plugin on the WordPress.org plugin repository. This is something useful for promoting your work. However, you're competing with thousands of other plugins on the repository. Your plugin can quickly become hidden in the sheer mass of available options, which can make it tough for users to find your plugin.

A dedicated page on your Web site for individual plugins can work wonders for your plugin marketing. The most important thing you can do when building a page on your Web site for a plugin is to keep the information presented relevant and descriptive of what functionality your plugin provides. This information needs to be easily accessible.

Announcing your plugin is also one of the most important things you can do to let others know that you've built a new WordPress plugin. If you don't have a blog or Web site, you should. This should be the first place you announce your plugin. The people most likely to freely promote your work are your blog readers. Some of them will have their own blogs and will write a post to announce it. Others will post links to your plugin on social networking sites.

The first step to promoting a new plugin should always be announcing it on your blog. When announcing your plugin, you should stick to writing about the plugin. Throwing it in as an afterthought to a blog post about other things won't get it much attention. The post should be entirely dedicated to the plugin. This provides an opportunity for you to give readers a great description of what the plugin does and why they should use it.

Some other things you can do when announcing a plugin include the following:

Ideally, if your plugin is well coded and easy to use, you won't have to offer much support. However, there will always be users who can't quite get it to work, don't understand specific instructions, or want to customize something. Offering support for your plugins creates an opportunity for you to become more popular among users.

If you're building plugins professionally, you need to consider creating a dedicated support channel on your Web site. This can be a ticket system, support forums, or some other type of support system. You may even opt to offer commercial support. Email may work as a support system when you're just starting out, but after your work becomes more popular, emails can quickly become tough to manage.

If you're just releasing plugins for fun or noncommercially, running support from your own site may seem like overkill. All plugins added to the WordPress.org repository (described earlier in this chapter) are tied into the WordPress support forums (http://wordpress.org/support). You can use these forums to offer support for your plugins and not worry about running support from your site.

Following are several benefits to offering support for your plugins:

Feedback from users and other developers is essential to creating great plugins. You're the developer of the plugin, so you probably know the code inside out and can use the plugin with no problems. Not everyone is looking at the plugin from your point of view, though. Feedback is a great way to see how others use your plugin.

Many support questions you encounter come down to a user not understanding how something works rather than a code issue. Listening to user feedback enables you to fix user experience issues that aren't easily seen by plugin developers.

Feedback is a large component in making WordPress a better platform. Following is a list of avenues users may take to give feedback to WordPress, which serve as great examples of how to handle feedback.

WordPress has a multimillion user base, so having an organized way to get feedback is crucial. Individual plugins don't generally have that many users, but a popular plugin can easily have thousands of users. If you build plugins on your own, feedback can become overwhelming without a dedicated system for keeping track of it.

You can receive feedback on your plugins in many ways.

Getting feedback is only part of the process. To improve your plugin and grow your user base, you need to act upon that feedback. Not all feedback and feature requests from users will be great ideas. You're still the developer and need to make that decision. Even if you don't use an idea presented by a user, you should still treat the idea and the user seriously. If necessary, explain why you decided not to go with a certain idea.

The biggest benefit of listening to and using feedback outside of improving your plugins is building a community. Building relationships with your users can benefit your work because your users are the people who will be promoting your plugins.

Developers are stereotyped as guys living and working from their parents' basement or garage. Of course, you know not all code-savvy people are recluses. On the Web, shying away into the basement won't help getting your plugin renowned. Fortunately, the Web offers opportunities for anyone to be a social butterfly.

To be great at marketing your plugins, yourself, and your company, you need to be socially active in the WordPress community. This means getting involved in the development of WordPress, introducing yourself to other developers, chatting in community forums, commenting on other people's blogs, and just being active in any way you can find.

One of the worst things you can do is leave comments on other blogs such as, "Hey, check out my new plugin!!! It's the best plugin ever!!!" That's seen as the equivalent of spamming. Let your work be known by allowing people to get to know you and keeping your comments relevant. Most blogs have a comment form field where you can leave a link back to your Web site. Many blog owners will visit the sites of people who leave useful and relevant comments. This opens an opportunity for someone new to recognize your work and possibly even promote it.

Being socially active isn't just about self-promotion. You should enjoy being involved in the community. Find those sites and blogs that you feel comfortable being a part of. If you're not enjoying yourself, it won't take long for you to give up on the process.

As you can probably see at this point, promoting your work is less about promoting specific plugins and more about promoting yourself or your company. If you're creating a company, you need to focus on building that brand's image within the WordPress community. If you're a solo act, you are the brand, so your focus should be on letting other people get to know you.

Following is a list of additional routes you may take to promote your work.

Everything on that list is something simple you can do to make yourself both a better developer and enable you to get more involved in the community. These are things you'll likely do not just as a marketing tactic but as something you enjoy doing.

You don't have to do everything on the list. However, the more ways you can get yourself involved, the more opportunities you have for promoting your plugins.