CUNY Academic Commons

QUESTIONS FOR THE PERSON REQUESTING THE PLUGIN/THEME [generally this means Matt or a community facilitator]
- What's the name of the plugin/theme?
- [plugins] In a few words, what does it do?
- How is the plugin/theme different from what's already provided on the Commons?
- What's the potential impact? Who will use it?
- Who initially made the request? [sometimes Matt is passing along requests from members, sometimes suggesting something he found himself]
- Who is the plugin author?
- Say a little bit about the release history and popularity of the plugin. How many times has it been downloaded? When was it last updated? [The idea behind these last two questions is that I'm more likely to look favorably on plugins that are less likely to be abandoned]

QUESTIONS FOR THE REVIEWING DEVELOPER [generally me]
- Maintenance: Given the data above, how likely is it that the plugin is going to be abandoned by the developer?
- Security: Scan for XSS and DB vulnerabilities [How? Is there a better way than doing it by hand? Anyone have a script that greps for things like 'echo $' and "INSERT "? I chatted a bit with Mark Jaquith in Phoenix and it sounds like he just has a list of things he searches for. Maybe we should invest in writing something.]
- Redundancy: If this plugin/theme does something that plugins/themes on the site already do, is there enough reason to put it on anyway? Maybe we should migrate users from the older plugin/theme to the new one? How hard would that be?
- Themes: What are the results of the Theme Check? Many of the 'required' warnings I don't care much about - they are wordpress.org nitpicks. But consistent calls to deprecated functions, for instance, could indicate something about the quality of the theme.