One of the things that I appreciate most about the open source community is the sense of collaboration that comes with sharing your work.

Case in point: This morning, I received the following tweet from someone who wanted to contribute to Tipsy Social Icons.

Sure, all plugins in the WordPress Plugins Repository are open source by nature, but GitHub makes collaboration that much easier, so I was happy to oblige.

Tipsy Social Icons Now on GitHub

Tipsy Social Icons on GitHub

This is one of the first plugins that I wrote for WordPress and actually released it to the plugin repository. In fact, I maintained a premium version of the plugin for about a year, but ended up retiring the project in favor of maintaining this version.

By adding this to GitHub, hopefully it will initiate:

  • An easier way to track issues and feature requests
  • More contributions from others
  • New features that are more useful to the community at large
  • And, of course, increased development

Though I try to be fairly open with pull requests, I do reserve the right to reject certain features as there is a vision behind this particular plugin that I want to maintain.

I’ve always been hesitant about having a free-for-all development for fear of the project morphing into something that offers a variety of seemingly unrelated features and a cluttered codebase.

I still believe that plugins should have a direction or vision and a purpose and should aim to maintain that. So if you’re on board, initiate some pull requests (or some issues) and let’s keep this project rolling.