How to add your plugin to the Official WordPress Plugin Repository

Since I finally managed to figur out exactly how the WordPress Plugin SVN Repository works after filtering through hints and trail and error, I thought I would share with fellow plugin developers who are just as lost as I was after trying to add a plugin to the Official WordPress Plugin Repository. It’s actually not that difficult - if you know what you’re doing! Note: This tutorial is for Windows users only.

  1. Go to the WordPress Extend > Plugins Page and submit your plugin information.
  2. Download and install TortoiseSVN
  3. Create a “SVN” folder and inside this create a folder with the name of your plugin, so you should have a directory like so: “\SVN\myplugin\”.
  4. Once you’ve received the approval email with your SVN repository link, right-click your plugin folder within the SVN directory and choose ‘SVN Checkout…’
  5. Enter your SVN URL in the ‘URL of repository’ field and the Checkout directory should be set correctly by default. Click OK. This will connect to your repository and download the default folders of branches, tags and trunk.
  6. Create a special “readme.txt” file (Follow the standards outlined in the example file).
  7. Run your “readme.txt” file through the Readme Validator to make sure it will work. This is the information used to accompany your plugin download.
  8. Place your plugin file, readme.txt and any screenshots into the trunk directory. Save screenshots filenames as ’screenshot-1′, ’screenshot-2′, etc. Make sure your main plugin file is within this folder, and not any sub-folders - the SVN will put your files in a folder anyway when it zips it up for download. Select all of your files within this directory and choose TortoiseSVN > Add and hit OK.
  9. Go to your tags directory and create a new folder based on your plugins current version number such as “1.0″. Copy and paste the files from your trunk folder into the “1.0″ folder. Select the “1.0″ folder and choose TortoiseSVN > Add and hit OK.
  10. Navigate back up to your “\SVN\myplugin\” folder and right click an empty area and choose “SVN Commit…”. This will upload your files to the repository.
  11. Your download should show up on the WordPress Plugins page within 15 minutes.

Hopefully that’s not too confusing. Good Luck!


This entry was posted on Thursday, May 10th, 2007 at 4:03 pm and is filed under News and Updates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response.

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