The Telegraph Media Group began embracing WordPress two and a half years ago: first its blogs were migrated over, then its My Telegraph community. They then began embracing WordPress people, hiring BuddyPress core developer Paul Gibbs, and hosting London WordPress meetups.
Now they’ve gone a stage further: releasing a WordPress plugin in the company name. Expire User Passwords has obvious applications in a more corporate environment: it’s a zero-configuration plugin which you simply install and forget about. Until you reach the 30-day expiry point, when you’re prompted to renew your password.
It’s available from the WordPress repository, where it’s owned by Paul and a new Telegraph user account. Or alternatively, they’ve just started making use of a Telegraph Github account which they seem to have registered two years ago.
Well done, Team Tele. Great to see a large corporate giving back to the WordPress community. I’d love to know how they got over the inevitable concerns about plugin support, liability and so on.
Response
Thanks for covering, Simon. I’m very excited that we’ve opensourced our first WordPress plugin; it may even be *the* first thing the Telegraph has opensourced (not sure). Big thanks to our Editorial and Technical teams for their support with this.
We’re keen to look to doing much more of this in the future as we build new things which we think other people might be interested in. This particular plugin may seem niche, and it is, but in many ways it was easier to take baby steps and get something small out on wordpress.org as our first plugin, rather than e.g. something more complex.
We have had and have used our Github account in the past for some (private) projects, but it’s the first time we’ve put anything public onto it. Some of our Web Dev team have added themselves to the members list on Github, so you can see who we are!
Telegraph uses SVN internally, but outside of work I am beginning to switch to Git and so was keen to use Github as a place for storage and bug reports.I suppose the only options were Github, Google Code, or the wp.org plugin Trac. (And, personally, I dislike the wp.org plugin trac!)
As far as support goes, that issue didn’t come up this time. Like you say, it’s an “install and forget about” plugin.