Plugin Compatibility Notes

As I write this, WordPress 2.7 is due to arrive in a few days. Now that’s very shiny and all, but there’s one thing that has always made me a bit wary about upgrading to a new version : plugin compatibility. When you have a lot of active plugins there’s always a chance that one of them will be incompatible with the upgrade and break your site.

The typical answer to the these fears is a resounding “Make backups!” call. However, here’s another idea – what if you could actually see which plugins are likely to be incompatible before upgrading, and watch out for them? Well, with this new plugin I’ve created you (kind-of) can!

Plugin Description

Compatibility Notes is a simple WordPress plugin that will attach a list of supported WordPress versions to every plugin’s description on the “Plugins” page. Here’s how it looks :

The compatibility information is extracted from each plugin’s readme.txt file, so nothing will be displayed for plugins with non-standard or missing readme files. Also, while adding a adding a big “Incompatible plugin!” warning to plugins that don’t “officially” support the currently installed version of WP would be easy, I decided against it because many old plugins work perfectly well in newer versions. It’s up to you to decide what to do with the information this plugin provides.

Download

compatibility-notes.zip (5 KB)

Requirements :

  • WordPress 2.5 – 2.8
  • PHP 5 or later

Meta : Arrgh, another small WordPress hack. Apparently I never learn. Also, my Internet connection is finally working again, yay 🙂

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 23:23 and is filed under WordPress Plugins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “Plugin Compatibility Notes”

  1. Chris Tolles says:
    December 6, 2008 at 15:27

    Tried to install, but got this error:

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘&’, expecting T_VARIABLE or ‘$’ in /homepages/15/d206252512/htdocs/watson/wp-content/plugins/compatibility-notes/compatibility-notes.php on line 136

    Any suggestions?

  2. White Shadow says:
    December 6, 2008 at 15:33

    This means you have an old version of PHP. As stated in the post, this plugin requires PHP 5 or later.

  3. WordPress Plugin Releases for 12/11 says:
    December 13, 2008 at 05:09

    […] Compatibility Notes […]

  4. Check WP 2.7-compatibility of installed plugins says:
    December 15, 2008 at 10:49

    […] Download Compatibility Notes plugin […]

  5. WordPress 2.7 技巧、插件与资源精选 - WordPress 非官方中文站 says:
    December 17, 2008 at 03:15

    […] Plugin Compatibility Notes(插件兼容性提醒) 这个 WordPress 插件可以让你通过添加 WordPress 的版本号，让你了解你正使用的插件是否兼容。因此，与其升级之后查看哪个插件无法工作，不如在升级之前查看哪一个可能会出问题。 […]

  6. rap dinle says:
    January 27, 2009 at 20:03

    My only real problem with google analytics is that it doesn’t work very well with a lot of ASP pages, which a lot of clients use nowadays. It can also get kind of hairy when trying to get it to understand what a conversion is..

  7. White Shadow says:
    January 28, 2009 at 00:05

    As far as I know, in GA a conversion is whatever you want it to be. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work – I haven’t really done much with that feature, except trying to track my AdSense ads with it (which “kind of” worked, but the system wasn’t really suited for that).

  8. rap dinle says:
    May 26, 2009 at 21:21

    whooww 🙂
    number one

  9. Zev Eisenberg says:
    June 11, 2009 at 16:15

    I love this plugin! Are you planning a release for 2.8?

  10. White Shadow says:
    June 12, 2009 at 00:26

    Indeed. I just uploaded a new version.

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