We’re excited to be part of the Change the Web Challenge.

Basically, the contest is to create a plugin, widget, mash up, hack, or other variety of web application that helps people find and share opportunities to take action. The grand prize is 50 benjis, and the best WordPress plugin will also be featured in the Plugin Directory. But the real prize is spreading a little more love in the world.

Click here for all the details.

“Writing a Plugin” in the WordPress Codex is where I got started when I needed to get hooked in to WordPress. Others might like to grab one of the over 4,000 open source WordPress plugins and tweak the source. If in need of a little help, the Plugins and Hacks forum is full of friends to assist you wrap your head around the code or debug a problem. Social Actions also has provided some developer resources.

Let’s show them how we change the web the WordPress way!

One of the biggest problems and most frequent complaints we’ve had with the WordPress.org Plugins Directory is the horrible, horrible search results.

No longer.  We’re now using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power search on the Plugins Directory both from the website and from within your blog’s admin (Plugins → Add New).

It works much better. There are a few oddities floating around (our fault not sphinx’s) that we’ll be cleaning up shortly, but we’re happy enough with it on the whole to start letting everyone else use it

Currently, the search only indexes the plugin’s title and description/installation/FAQ/etc. (from the plugin’s readme.txt file), but we’ll be adding things like authors and tags soon.

WordPress by itself is very simple — what makes it compelling for most of its users is the wide array of plugins (and themes) available for WP. The average WordPress blog has about 5 plugins installed! Today we just passed 4,000 plugins available in our plugin directory. (Which is also embedded into everyone’s WordPress 2.7 or above.)

I declare January 28th our official “Thank a Plugin Developer” day. To celebrate take a look at the plugins you use and love, visit the author’s site, find their contact form, and drop them a note thanking them. (Or Paypal!) Look for the links in the plugin directory to “author homepage” and also to donate directly if they’ve specified a Paypal address.

Thank you to everyone who has ever written a plugin for WordPress, and here’s to the next four thousand.