Why has WP stopped giving developers love?

The new plugin directory is definitely a work in progress, and I don’t think they’re done yet. In the mean time, it looks like the “Donate to this plugin” link can be set to whatever you want, but I’m not sure how to do this exactly.

The design isn’t final yet, and you can link as much as you like within the readme.

I found the links to each developer’s Web site and plugin page were very helpful in evaluating the context for the plugin: longevity, sustainability, references to other plugins. Moving those links away just makes that harder to do.

I agree with jcollier.

Also some developers have their own support forum. Lets face it, due to the huge number of developers and the mega number of wordpress users, plus the limitations of bbpress, the forum is not what it used to be 3-4 years ago. So it is very helpful to be able to go to the developers plugin page and ask for support.

Also those links help developers get more visitors = more traffic revenue.
Please don’t take away that small amount of income from developers.

You can still place links in the plugin’s description text. That might actually get more attention than the old sidebar links.

That’s a good point.

I liked having those links in one place so I could quickly evaluate plugins, so I hope developers will add them into the text manually.

I think the FAQ might be the best place, though. “Where can I get support?” link to wherever you wanna send people. Not everyone makes a separate page/site for their plugins, after all ??

I think the old sidebar is the best place, it’s a good standard. I would say more often than not, I feel the need to go to the developers website for a number of reasons before I will decide to use a plugin. I don’t want to have to go searching around for the link, the sidebar is a nice, standard and quick way to get more info on the plugin and the legitimacy of the developer.

As a Plugin developer, initially I was very disappointed to see it go. But it may return in the final ‘bake’ who knows. But there are alternatives such as adding links in the description etc.

Also, I’m sure that I saw somewhere that one of the justifications to take the link out was that it doesn’t really generate that much traffic for the Plugin developer anyway!

This is hard to judge myself as my Plugins don’t get downloaded hundreds of thousands of times! ??

For the developer it can add traffic. Little traffic is still traffic and you never know what if can result to. Maybe more community connections, more backlinks and so on.

As a user it is very useful for seeing a demo of the plugin, looking at replies to the post on the developers websites. Perhaps discussing things in the developers forum.

I personally think it is a big mistake to take away the link and not give something back in return.