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Google Summer of Code has announced this years’ OSS projects that have been accepted to the program. While going through the list I stumbled upon some features that I would really like to have in WordPress, like Plugin Update Notification, One-click installation of themes/plugins and this, that and this. They all have something in common, they all require a better plugin format!

There are tons of plugins out there and only a couple support these features. Why? Well, if you look at the Writing a Plugin documentation you see that a plugin can be packaged absolutely in any possible way.

Plugins can be zip, rar, gz, bz2 etc. archives. They can contain any number of subdirectories that the administrator has to copy to certain other folders and the requirement of meta information is quite relaxed. The automation of installation, upgrade, deletion, versioning for all the plugins is impossible with such relaxed rules.

WP plugins (like the others already have — FF extensions, Eclipse plugins, Google Gadgets, WARs …) should have a solid structure so that the management of the plugins could be automated. One click install, update notifications or automatic updates, public repositories and other cool features can be built upon this.

Besides all the other great ideas already posted I’ve submitted one that would try to address these problems from more ground up.