If you have worked with WordPress plugins in past and created your own plugins you might well know the “WordPress Plugin Boilerplate”. It is even linked in the WordPress Plugin Developer doc as a “starting point”.
There is a problem (not unfamiliar to WordPress) with that repo/boilerplate.
It doesn’t take user input very “serious”.
Just have a look at the numerous very justified Pull Requests dangling there since years. There are numerous valid PRs there, from typos up to DOC issues and as well very valuable new features.
The maintainer’s answer to inquiries as of whether PRs are taken or not/Is repo alive or not are not really encouraging, and directly contradict the reaction upon my announcement to hard fork the repo.
That said, I highly appreciate the work people have done in the Boilerplate over the past years, however given the number of issues in the original Boilerplate and also the missing ability for the community to interact, I decided to maintain a new, Better WordPress Plugin Boilerplate. Most of the PRs from the original that made sense are already merged into its master or develop branch. It even has GitHub Actions for PHPCS and WPCS now.
I wanted to share this here since the boilerplate, while stating “WordPress” in its name, shall clearly be as well intended for CP Developers, and if ever CP/WP diverge too much to maintain one repo, I will split it into a separate Repo for CP.
A plugin to generate your own copy of the boilerplate (or any boilerplate really) is under development, and actually functional in its early stage.
This plugin will not be published on the WP Repo due to restrictions and opinionated issues of the WP Plugin repo rules, it will perhaps be added to the CP repo, although likely not since it is more a Developer Tool, than a “user” plugin.
A website is planned with a generator form, to download fresh, renamed copies of the Boilerplate.
I am taking inputs here as of how to name that website. I was thinking about “plugin-boilerplate.com” (or a .org). Opinions and suggestions highly welcome.
You are warmly invited to cooperate, use, and do whatever you like with the Repo.
The main idea of this boilerplate is to give a kickstart to plugin developers to generate WPCS compliant, standardised Plugins. With one bug difference to the original, which is that community is taken serious.
If you have any input, ideas, issues, please use the GitHub Discussions for the project. For Bugs, use the Issues reporter.
