Monday, January 08, 2007

downloads.wordpress.org needs a face lift

Over this past weekend, I built a new wordpress.org blog server on a new CentOS 4.4 server.  It seems the 'official'  plugin/theme repository page at http://downloads.wordpress.org needs quite a face lift. In its current form, the plug-in and theme repository page is
  • spartan: It gives an ordered list of plugins and themes by name (and/or versions).
  • poor in function:
    • No descriptions to tell whether you need or like a theme or plugin. I had to just download it and install it, then read the descriptions from /wp-admin/plugins.php. Quite some wasted bandwidth on the server and time & efforts on the users.
    • no option to download it all to try it out. Instead, you have to click on each one. The lack of description certainly exacerbates the problem.
  • not up-to-date. For example, the link to tiger-admin plugin doesn't work. Upstream now has tiger-admin-v3.0.zip.
  • malformed HTML. plugin page has an empty link text for tiger-admin plugin, causing the page to display funny in FireFox 1.5/Linux and FireFox 2.0/windows.
  • Many of the themes don't show preview screens under /wp-admin/themes.php.  Yet to check whether the themes themselves are at fault, or the tiger-admin v3.0 theme is the culprit.
  • no security or integrity assurance: no checksum or digital signature is provided to verify the authenticity and/or integrity of the file.
I guess I'll generate a more functional version and contribute to the site. Or alternatively, host a beautified version here myself.

1 comment:

jackOfAllTrades said...

A little research found that the preview is supported by screenshot.png. Reason the previews were missing is because the permission on screenshot.png was too restrictive (0600). My own umask is 0022, so it'd come from the downloaded theme zip files.