Add support for wordpress plugins

[andrew]

Website: https://wordpress.org/plugins/

API docs: https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/reference/plugins/

purl type: wordpress

[gusaus]

WordPress is one of the largest open-source ecosystems, with over 60,000 plugins and 10,000 themes, most of which are hosted on SVN at WordPress.org. Since Ecosyste.ms currently doesn’t support SVN, indexing all of these plugins and themes accurately is a challenge. Adding SVN support would be a crucial step to get a comprehensive view of the ecosystem.

Another consideration is that many of the most popular plugins and themes already have established monetization models. If usage is the main factor for funding distribution, this could end up favoring those projects. It might be worth exploring ways to boost underfunded projects or looking at other ways to determine which projects are most critical. Andrew mentioned the idea of factoring in the number of funders a project already has, so projects with little to no funding get a boost in ranking. This could be integrated with Open Collective and GitHub APIs, which are already part of the Ecosyste.ms stack.

WordPress also has the Five for the Future initiative, which encourages companies and individuals to contribute back to the community. There could be a great opportunity to align Ecosyste.ms Funds with that program to encourage even more support. Since Ecosyste.ms has already created a dedicated fund for WordPress (https://funds.ecosyste.ms/funds/wordpress/), it can distribute funds directly to contributors without requiring the WordPress Foundation to manage the process. This could simplify and scale financial contributions while maintaining transparency and community control.

We’ve also discussed the challenges of sustaining community projects, teams, and working groups, which are critical to the ecosystem but don’t always fit traditional funding models. It might be worth exploring how Ecosyste.ms can support these initiatives, possibly by linking them to related plugins and themes or integrating them more directly into funding rounds.

We’ve also been discussing how Ecosyste.ms could support the WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards, which are currently stalled but could benefit from the data insights Ecosyste.ms provides.

Helping maintainers understand how to use funding.yml files might also increase transparency and funding opportunities.

Looking forward to seeing how this evolves and happy to help however I can!

[gusaus]

Regarding the usage-based model for community initiatives, working groups, and teams in the WordPress ecosystem, usage metrics would likely be low, and many contributions would be non-code.

We could address this by creating a top-level WordPress collective WordPress/sustainability#24 and setting up 'projects' for core, community initiatives, working groups, and teams. This would centralize funds and allow collective admins to allocate them manually, overcoming the limitations of a usage-based model.

Would love to hear thoughts on this approach.