Continuing our series from CloudFest Hackathon with updates on day two, we’re joined by Javier Casares from Spain and Mark Heijnen from the Netherlands, as they dive into their innovative project born from a WordPress hackathon: WP Plugin Insights.
Together, they chat about how AI can bring deeper clarity and transparency to WordPress plugins, focusing on key aspects like compatibility, security, and translations. Javier and Mark share how their team is working to validate developer claims, improve the way users discover plugins, and even support other emerging AI tools in the WordPress ecosystem.
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Takeaways
AI-Assisted Plugin Analysis: Javier and Mark are developing WP Plugin Insights, a tool aimed at providing deeper insights into WordPress plugins by analyzing their code for compatibility, security, translations, and overall functionality, going beyond what is currently available on WordPress.org 02:41.
Validating Developer Claims: The team is focused on validating what plugin developers say about their plugins, such as minimum PHP and WordPress version requirements, and assessing the community’s contributions, especially translation quality and coverage 03:43.
Better Search and Discovery: They see a need for improved plugin repositories, allowing users to search for plugins based on specific criteria like language compatibility, which is currently limited on platforms like WordPress.org 05:07.
Collaborative Hackathon Experience: Their project is part of a hackathon, and they’ve benefited from working with a diverse seven-person team as well as exchanging ideas with other groups, including those developing AIs to build plugins or related scripts 06:47.
Supporting Beginners and Users: WP Plugin Insights provides value not only to experienced developers but also to beginners and non-developers by offering a system to validate AI-generated plugins, making plugin selection and development more accessible 07:14.
You can read more about the project on the Hackathon site here.
Episode Transcript
Javier Casares:
Hi, I’m Javier Casares, I’m from Spain, I work in my own company as his admin CEO whatever because it’s my own company and last year we were thinking about doing some AI WordPress related things and now we are here trying to explain that.
Marko Heijnen:
So Mark I’m Mark Heijnen, I’m from the Netherlands. I work for a company called Jamf and also have my own company called Code Kitchen. Yeah, so what Javier explained. So last year we did a hackathon together, he was co leading, I was in his team and yeah in the evening sessions you start about thinking about other IDs and plugin review came to mind and we had a pretty open discussion with some viewers and we discussed like what possibilities AI but also randomly like okay what are developers expecting from a plugin review or end users from okay, I need to select a plugin, how can I do it? The best it works for them but because the plugin pages on WordPress R give a lot of information but yeah the search is still pretty limited in how they can do their work.
Javier Casares:
Yeah also we don’t know really you can read the readme txt the information in the WordPress pages but we don’t really know what a plugin does so it was like maybe we can play with the AI to send everything there and as questions like who is the best developer, who is the worst developer, these kind of things that’s a joke. But that conversation was the seed for the project this year. It’s called WP Plugin Insights and as the name is very obvious but then as the name says we try to check different things from the plugin code basically. So we are focusing now on compatibility, security, translations and we have a lot of ideas like I don’t know if the plugin is WordPress Multisite compatible in some way or I don’t know if those calls to outside the WordPress sending information, I don’t know. So our idea is to try to understand what the plugin does and show information easily to the user so they can decide to use the plugin or not.
Marko Heijnen:
Yeah, so it’s a lot of validating what the developer claims. So for example, is the php version minimum correct, WordPress correct? Maybe translations show how good his community does. Because you can’t say that to the developer. Right. Like it’s all about the community around it if they translate his plugin or not. And then it’s basically trying to create as much additional information about that plugin is what we can do. So for translations, yeah, reading blogpress translator WordPress.org then also check the plugin, see if all the translatable strings are there. Maybe if the translatable strings are not in English. So try to give a little bit more insights than they would get from WordPress.org itself because that’s developer content. Like they can say it’s the best plugin, it’s the number one, it’s the best form builder. We don’t make any request outside but you don’t know. And sometimes that little bit of insight is nice to have. Like if you have a payment gateway, sure it needs to make online request, but if it’s a form builder, why would it. Maybe it’s for maybe update, but if it’s on web dark, there’s all that logic already in place. So it’s trying to find useful insights around that plugin and also maybe want to build a better plugin repository where they can actually search on specific things. Like maybe I only want to see plugins in the language Dutch or in Spanish and then get only those results back. Because if you now go to nl.WordPress.org for example, it’s basically the same view except it’s translated though it already knows the context. Like okay, I only want to maybe see this plugins or I believe it shows you a warning but then you’re already one step further in. So it’s going back and forth then.
Javier Casares:
So we are doing things because the hackathon didn’t end it yet. So we are vibing as a.
Marko Heijnen:
Cool, we’re halfway there.
Javier Casares:
Yeah, yeah, no, but I think I was not very. But I had some questions in my mind this morning about if we could do everything we wanted. But I think we are on the right path Also we have our team, we are seven, I think so it’s not a big team, but it’s not so small because so years ago we were two and I’ve seen teams for 15 I think so we are in the middle so I think it’s the right size and also we’ve been working in some ways with other teams talking with ideas. Some people came here we can use your project for some things so. Well, it’s been a different way to see the hackathon so it’s fun.
Marko Heijnen:
Yeah and one of those project was then a fair project they now going to do work around type of three but they also have already created a lot of bad scripts so that’s for us a lot of valuable insights see what they’re doing, maybe get some ideas. And then another team that basically builds an AI to build WordPress plugin they were like okay, can we use your service to get valuable feedback if the AI’s job is doing correctly. So if you’re a decent enough developer maybe you don’t need it but if you’re like a beginner or just a user and I would just want. I want to build a plugin with the AI that it’s. There’s still a system around that that validates if the AI does it because the user might not be able to themselves or it’s more tricky depending on what they try to which plugin they try to build.
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