Can WordPress plugin quality really be measured, or do automated scores mostly measure what is easy to count?
At CloudFest Hackathon, the team I co lead built WP Plugin Insights, a platform that analysed plugins for compatibility, security, maintainability and other quality signals. The prototype showed how much can be automated, but also how quickly apparently objective checks can produce misleading conclusions.
For this talk, I am rebuilding the platform around a simpler principle: analysis tools should report evidence, while separate policies decide how that evidence is interpreted.
I will demonstrate the platform, share what we learned from building it twice, and explore the limits of automated quality analysis. Can a small utility plugin, a WooCommerce extension and a page builder really be judged using the same criteria?
Attendees will leave with practical ideas for evaluating plugins, designing analysis systems and questioning quality scores that appear more objective than they really are.