Call for Changes to the WordPress Plugin Install/Upgrade Mechanism

First off, I think the Word­Press plu­gin instal­la­tion sys­tem is sec­ond to none in the indus­try, but I do think that there is room for improve­ments. I will out­line them below.

Con­sis­tent doc­u­men­ta­tion - Every plu­gin SHOULD have a changelog! Not sure why so many don’t. I think this should be required when post­ing a plu­gin. Some plu­g­ins have screen­shots some don’t. You never really know what your going to find

Abil­ity to install older ver­sions from one-click installer — There are times where I want to install an older ver­sion of a plu­gin but the link to the older ver­sions is hid­den when in one-click mode. You MUST go to the site then down­load and upload it to your blog man­u­ally. This seems like unnec­es­sary extra work.

Roll­back mech­a­nism — Increas­ingly I am run­ning into plu­g­ins where updates break some­thing. After a day or so another update will be pushed that fixes but it can be quite annoy­ing. Cur­rently I am restor­ing my back­ups locally to test the updates before I go to prod. It would be nice if dur­ing the upgrade Word­Press zipped up the cur­rent plu­gin and archived. If you wanted to roll back it would sim­ple reverse the process. In the inter­est of sim­plic­ity I rec­om­mend adding a devel­oper defin­able flag to denote if their plu­gin requires DB changes in which case it would not have the option to roll back. Most plu­g­ins would work with the new system.