Please change your readme change log to the plugin dir standard

Hi @alanfuller,

I have forwarded this to our developer team’s attention. Thank you for reaching out and reporting this!

Hi Alan! Thanks for reaching out!

We do indeed use a different markdown format to display the heading and the list of the changelog section. That’s something we do purposefully, for reasons I’ll highlight below.

That specific Markdown format and changelog structure is called “Keep a Changelog”, and is described in detail here.

If that’s an option for you, I think it may be useful to support the “Keep in Changelog” format in addition to the simple list that you may already support. That changelog format has some added benefits that can be useful for both plugin users and folks looking to extract data from changelogs, like you:

1. It includes extra information that is not typically found in plugins using a simple list: the release date and a categorized list of changes. I believe that extra info is something that can be very useful to every site owner, it makes it easier to quickly read through a changelog to find the most important information to you.
2. It follows an existing standard in the industry, used outside of WordPress as well.
3. It is supported by the?www.ads-software.com?plugin directory readme parser. You can see it parsed well when viewing our changelog section.
4. Other plugins in the directory already use that standard.

Let us know what you think about this!

Thank you for the detailed explanation.
Indeed I could handle different styles in my parser and may do that at a future date – all I’m doing is extracting the latest entry as a precis and linking to the full changelog, so indeed if the parser ‘fails’ it still shows a link so nothing critical.