WordPress web hosting users learn of new Compatibility feature

Those using WordPress web hosting will be pleased that the team behind the blog publishing application are looking to make its core, plugin and theme upgrades "as painless as possible".

Michael Adams, from WordPress, has launched a beta of a new Compatibility feature in the plugin directory, which is powered by people’s votes. Perhaps advanced web hosting users will look to help out.

When viewing a plugin in the directory, users can select a WordPress version and a plugin type from the drop-downs. The percentage of people that marked a combination as compatible against how many put it down as incompatible is then shown.

Those web hosting users that wish to join in can logon and choose a WordPress version and a plugin type and then either click the ‘works’ or the ‘broken’ button.

At the current time, the WordPress team is just getting all the information together, but they are encouraging people to vote, and not just on broken plugins.

"Cast a ‘Works’ vote for every plugin that works on the version of WordPress you are using. This can help improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our data and prevent a few mistaken ‘Broken’ votes from weighing too heavily," Mark Jaquith wrote on the company blog.

He added that eventually the WordPress team is hoping to gather this compatibility feedback from within WordPress, letting users vote directly from their plugins admin screen.

The aim is to use the data gathered to inform people of plugin incompatibilities with a new version of WordPress during the upgrade process and for this to be useful, WordPress needs a large set of high-quality compatibility information.

Work is currently ongoing on WordPress 2.9 and soon the first beta version will be available. Those using advanced web hosting users could get involved with the 2.9 beta testing.

Written by Jermaine Jones