Seamless Donations plugin doesn't show the right developer name

[dgewirtz]

It shows "by Designeneers" which was the case before it was adopted 18 months ago. It should be "by David Gewirtz".

From a design point of view, I strongly dislike how reviews have visual primacy over the product description. The description page should be open and visible, especially since the review summary is also at the right.

Making reviews the main and first thing users see mean the repository will get gamed far more than it already has. Don't like that.

Thanks!

[Ipstenu]

​https://wordpress.org/plugins/seamless-donations/

vs

​https://wordpress.org/plugins-wp/seamless-donations/

This only seems to happen on the new layout (FYI - please make sure to specify that :D)

I changed "Primary Author" on the old system to see if that would change it. Where are we pulling that from?

[samuelsidler]

Committers can change the listed author in the plugin author dashboard, currently in wp-admin.

[dd32]

Replying to Ipstenu:

I changed "Primary Author" on the old system to see if that would change it. Where are we pulling that from?

That's the field it's pulling from, but changing that in bbPress doesn't change it in WordPress if the import has already happened.

[obenland]

@dd32: 1840.diff​ is untested, but does that go in the direction ​you had in mind?

[dd32]

Replying to obenland:

@dd32: 1840.diff​ is untested, but does that go in the direction ​you had in mind?

Yes; Although I envisioned it only happening as a once-off, not on every import.
It depends on if the plugin admin is going to retain the 'switch primary author' selection or not/

[obenland]

I think it should retain it. Should we close this as maybelater then and create/run that script on launch if need be?

[Otto42]

In the past, we have mainly used the "primary author" field just as a way to know where a plugin originally came from. This is basically the same as the "author" field in WordPress posts, just a single author connection.

But we don't show "Authors" on the plugins page using that. Plugins don't have authors, they have Contributors and Committers. The list of authors should be the same as the list of Contributors. The list of committers only controls access to the SVN (as well as any form of "admin" screen for the plugin).

So, you really need two sets of users: Contributors who will be shown as the "Authors", and committers who have access to the SVN. Neither of those is the "author" in the post sense, so the author field there will be unused or only used internally.

[dd32]

But we don't show "Authors" on the plugins page using that. Plugins don't have authors, they have Contributors and Committers. The list of authors should be the same as the list of Contributors. The list of committers only controls access to the SVN (as well as any form of "admin" screen for the plugin).

Although that's how the plugin directory operated in the past, It's not how it's primarily used within WordPress, nor by most of the common multi-author plugins you will come across.

In WordPress we have always displayed a single primary author, and a list of Contributors (Which the directory, arguably incorrectly, called Authors, as it lacked any other data-source).

For most of the multi author plugins, they usually have a singular author or company which is marked as the plugin author (Just the same as the Plugin Headers). Note that sometimes the author is also "The XYZ Plugin Team" which while won't be supported super easily by the changes here, opens the ability to set that through an independent user account, much like companies currently do.

Part of the efforts here (although not obvious on this trac ticket) have been to make it consistent for a plugin author to know what will be shown in what place (unlike the present situation).

[dd32]

Some details about how many plugins affected

• 877 plugins have owners who are not committers
• 611 plugins have owners who are not committers OR contributors
• 580 plugins have owners who are not committers OR contributors AND the plugin has committers (A bunch of plugins are open to the public but have no committers, which is odd)

Those numbers are after filtering out closed/disabled plugins, plugins whose slug matches their owner name (3) and a handful of accounts which were obviously business accounts (ie. such as buddypress who owns BuddyPress, automattic who owns a bunch of plugins, etc).

I'll post a list of affected plugins before any changes are made.

[dd32]

In 4197:

Plugin Directory: Switch Contributors from being stored as post meta to a taxonomy to allow for more efficient querying.

/author/$author/ / author_name queries are now based on this taxonomy rather than by the post_author.

See #1724, #1840.

[dd32]

Forgot to reference this ticket. This change means we're not currently relying upon post_author. This change may not stay around.

r4200: Plugin Directory: Trial switching out the Author Byline to utilise the plugin header Author fields.

This improves the consistency with how WordPress itself displays plugins both in the plugin listing, and in the plugin installer.

See #1719.

[dd32]

In 4202:

Plugin Directory: Treat /author/$author queries as taxonomy queries, and not author queries.
This is unfortunately needed as WordPress expects that the post_author of the posts is the Author for author templates, and as a result displays an incorrect archive title.

See #1840.

[samuelsidler]

Milestone Plugin Directory v3 - M9 deleted