Kill switch

[obenland]

A way to gracefully deal with merged feature plugins, improving the user experience around it.

[dd32]

I'm not entirely sure what's being proposed here, so I'm going to offer up two thoughts:

1. Anything "kill switch"able is not something that can be done in the Plugin Directory, that's up to the plugin to include appropriate flags that stops the plugin from doing something after it's merged.

2. We currently close feature plugins on WordPress.org after they're merged, which means we loose a tiny-tiny bit of history and links from older blog posts.
   It'd be great if we could keep the plugin open, but add a note that the plugin was merged into WordPress X.
   Normally I'd say this is something that should be in the plugin readme, but we'd also want to exclude it from search results.
   It seems like what we need here is a Status of some kind that leaves a plugin public, but excludes it from search results.
   It's possible that we could have a note in the readme, and a way to exclude items from search results.

[Ipstenu]

We currently close feature plugins on WordPress.org after they're merged, which means we loose a tiny-tiny bit of history and links from older blog posts.

Not always, and not consistently though.

In the revamp we're looking at a category for 'featured' plugins. What if we had one for 'merged' as well? Then we could change that category and the repo could hide from search, remove the download button, etc etc? Make it admin only, I'm fine with that, since joe random shouldn't make something 'featured' anyway :)

[Ipstenu]

Given that the way forward with featured plugins is changing, I think it's okay to close this as 'wontfix' for now. We can always reopen it later :)

This issue is specifically endemic to a small (tiny) subset of plugins. Landed ones:

• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/mp6/
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-area-chooser/
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/thx38/
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/dashboard/ - Closed
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/widget-customizer/
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/media-grid/
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/focus/ - Closed
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/customize-partial-refresh/
• ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/customizer-ui-experiments/

Of those only ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/customizer-ui-experiments/ and MAYBE ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/mp6/ should stay open I think... We could always hit up the devs and ask them to close. But this is more of a process issue, since the majority of those plugins should stay closed.

(I've left off the ones that aren't 100% imported into core, like RestAPI, on purpose :) )

[westonruter]

This feature plugin should also be retired: ​https://wordpress.org/plugins/menu-customizer/

[Ipstenu]

@celloexpressions would need to drop a note to plugins@… :)

I have, more than once, pinged devs directly about those things. I'll toss up another post on make/plugins though.