Case study of an amateur plugin author

[david (David Taylor)]

@piffy

The goal of the “depreciation” time period where the plugins still work but the site puts up a warning that they will break soon is to give the plugin authors enough time to fix them. Yet in that time period, a team of full-time paid developers couldn’t update the core plugin development documentation.

Just to clarify on this point: the deprecation timeline for hbs has only started recently. The earliest we’ll consider dropping support is after the next ESR (end of July). So yes, we should’ve updated the documentation sooner, but this isn’t a case of ‘dropping support without enough warning’. .hbs is still supported, and there is plenty of time to make the necessary changes.

We maintain over 600 themes & plugins, so I can assure you that we “feel the pain” of these migrations as well. We do our best to make the changes as smooth as possible for everyone, and will continue learning from each change we make.

@piffy

it’s 1000x easier to build a plugin than it ever has been before.

Yup

@piffy

A single context document for an agent to read and build a plugin skeleton

We don’t quite have this yet. But we are starting to build up a directory of skills in the core repository. Plus, all the developer documentation markdown has been moved into the core repository, partly so that it’s easier for AI agents to reference.