One of the many strengths of the open-source WordPress project is the availability of third-party plugins that allow publishers to extend the functionality of the core WordPress software.
There are nearly 60,000 plugins available in the WordPress.org plugin directory, but not all plugins are created equal. Using poor-quality plugins can have adverse effects on your site’s performance and introduce security problems. Using too many plugins can often lead to conflicts between them, increasing the risk that your site may become unstable or crash.
Newspack is designed to take advantage of that broad universe of plugins, while eliminating much of the risk, by carefully curating a collection of plugins that are both reliable and tailored to the needs of digital news sites. Some of these plugins are more tightly integrated directly into the Newspack platform, while others have simply been reviewed by our team and selected for use because they meet a business need many of our publishers have.
From time to time, publishers identify new plugins that they may want to incorporate into their site. To help you make informed decisions about the plugins you choose, the Newspack team reviews new plugins for security and performance to ensure that they work well on the Newspack platform and are less likely to cause you headaches down the road. Our team also has decades of experience working with news publishers using WordPress so we’re happy to help you think through your business and editorial needs and recommend plugins that we know will work well for your site.
We maintain a list of approved plugins that have either been built by our team, reviewed by our support staff, or that have been used by a number of our other publishers without incident. Any plugin on this list can be installed on your Newspack site without our intervention.
If you’d like to use a plugin that doesn’t appear on this list, we ask that you fill out this short form to request a review.
Once you’ve submitted the plugin for review, if we need more information or recommend a different approach, we’ll reach out to discuss the business or editorial needs you’re trying to address and decide whether to proceed with a review of the plugin you’ve requested. We’ll review new plugins on a regular basis and add new plugins to the list weekly (so you can expect the review to take about a week to complete).
The outcome of our review will be a simple red/yellow/green rating.
- Red = a plugin that has significant flaws that we will not allow on our platform;
- Yellow = a plugin that has some issues but that we’ll provisionally allow (though we may come back to you at a later date if we notice further issues);
- Green = a plugin that has few or no issues that we think you will be able to use without incident.
For plugins receiving a Yellow or Green rating, you will be free to install the plugin in question immediately upon completion of our review. For plugins receiving a Red rating, we’ll try to identify alternative plugins that might work better and perform another review in our next weekly review cycle.