People have been using WordPress for more than 15 years. There have been many changes and improvements to WordPress since Matt forked it from b2 in 2004. Allowing others to create functionalities on top of WordPress was the biggest growth hack for WordPress.
It wasn’t until May 22, 2004, when the third release of WordPress, named Mingus (v1.2), was released with support for a new feature named “Plugins.” Since 2004, there has been an exponential growth in the WordPress plugin repository. There are more than 50k+ plugins on the WordPress repo. With these vast numbers of plugins in the repository – it is often hard to find a plugin for particular use cases.
WPHive.com introduces a new approach to solving this problem. This is the first of its kind. WP Hive promises to solve the missing features of WordPress.org and tries to improve upon that.
In a blog post published earlier today, we got to learn about this completely revamped website. The website currently has more than 50K+ plugin data and provides useful insights such as memory usage, page speed impact, how frequently a plugin is updated, whether it is memory friendly or not, whether it is page speed friendly or not, whether a plugin has proper database footprint or not and more. The website also measures if a certain plugin is compatible with PHP 7.2 and the latest version of WordPress.
While talking with Saif, we got to know more about how his idea of creating a better WordPress repository came to life.
“I was frustrated how WordPress.org handles plugin data, and I simply wanted to make it better,” said Saif.
In addition to providing detailed plugin insights to almost all WordPress plugins – the website also allows comparing two plugins side by side. This is the first time we have seen anything like this in the WordPress ecosystem. While comparing two plugins side by side – we could find out which plugin is taking more memory and impacts page speed with other essential info. This is something very exciting for all WordPress users.
Lastly, the website has a separate discover section. This section allows any WordPress users to find plugins based on most downloaded, most rated, and most active installations. This is something you only get to see on Play Store and Apple’s Appstore. It’s great to have a feature like this to find and discover plugins. Users can also find plugins of different categories like Gutenberg, Elementor, SEO, Security, and more.
As WordPress enthusiasts, we find this new approach totally new. There has not been anything like this before in the WordPress ecosystem before. The way WP Hive is handling all these plugin data and showing them in beautiful charts, graphs, and actionable insights is awesome. They have launched the product on ProductHunt too. You can give an upvote by going to the homepage.
While talking to Saif on the future of this project, he said that there are more interesting things are planned for 2920, but he cannot just reveal it now. We wish him and the team good wishes for the future.
WordPress is a very good platform despite updating many times but for me it is still the best, of course it needs to improve some things.