Changelog Generator For WordPress Plugins
A few months ago, WordPress.org introduced a new feature available to plugins hosted in the Plugin Directory – changelogs. Having an easily accessible changelog is certainly a usability plus, but I felt it created unnecessary work for plugin developers. Personally, I usually provide meaningful log messages (example) when uploading a new version of a plugin to the repository, so updating the changelog with pretty much the same information seems redundant.
This gave me the idea to write a PHP script that can generate a wordpress.org-compatible changelog from the revision log. It works for any plugin hosted in the official plugins directory and can be a handy starting point for adding a changelog to plugins that don’t have it yet :
- Run the changelog generator
- Download the source code (97 KB, requires PHP 5)
For those too lazy to click one of the above links, here’s a screenshot :
And I really do need to stop making these small hacks 🙂
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Awesome, I was waiting for someone to do exactly this 🙂
Now, package as a plugin that will pull changelogs on the fly and display in the Manage Plugins page? 🙂
Couple of thoughts:
– allow GET for easier bookmarking
– is the changelog trimmed? For instance checking “ozh-admin-drop-down-menu” I don’t get it all
Yes, I was thinking it would be useful if there was a “What’s new?” link in each plugin update notification that you could click to see a changelog and decide whether you need to upgrade right away.
Okay, changed the form to GET.
The changelog isn’t “trimmed”. The script pulls the version information from /tags/ (it would be hugely inefficient to parse every single changeset and check the Version field in the plugin header), so it doesn’t work very well for plugins that do everything in the /trunk/, like Admin Drop-down Menu.