WordPress.org is a very capable platform for plugin/theme developers to host their creations. There are many advantages of hosting your plugin on WordPress.org, for example –
- Exposure to millions of WordPress users without actually spending anything on advertising
- An easy source control repository option – subversion
- Automatic release management and automatic updates to users
- Automatic web-page generation for the plugin using simple to write README
- Download statistics for the plugin
- A very good rating system too
However, recently WordPress has become very strict on licensing of code uploaded on their repositories. They no more allow you to use any code that is licensed under Creative Commons. This is a big problem for me as I’m using a third-party tool licensed under creative commons, and many of my users were dissapointed when I had to remove this tool from my plugin.
So, I decided to host my plugin somewhere else to be able to use code licensed under creative commons. The most important aspect of this decision is that, I’ll loose ability to provide auto-update for my plugins. Then I came across this excellent script written by Kaspars. It allows you to setup auto-update mechanism for your plugin which is not hosted on WordPress.org.
When I started using this script, I realized that there is huge potential in this script to be useful for many more WordPress developers like me. So I developed this script further to make it easier to deploy and added more features to it, for example –
- Serve multiple plugins using same script
- Serve different types of versions like stable, alpha, beta, lite, pro, test etc.
- Easy to configure ini file
I plan to add some more features to this script in future, so I uploaded the same on GitHub.com as a project.
Visit the project page of this script on GitHub.com to download this script or get more details.