While working on my WordPress plugin, I noticed that some plugins on wordpress.org display an additional “Community plugin” section in their developer sidebar, including a link to their source repository.
I initially assumed this was controlled by readme.txt, the plugin header, or some SVN convention. It turns out it is none of those.
Assisted by an AI Agent1, a little source-code archaeology revealed that WordPress.org uses an internal taxonomy plugin_business_model with terms including:
community
commercial
canonicalThe taxonomy is registered by the Plugin Directory code and rendered by checking the assigned term.
The important detail for me turned out that this is not an author-controlled setting.
The taxonomy is available in the WordPress.org internal admin UI, but assigning it requires a special capability (plugin_set_category) that is only available to Plugin Team reviewers and administrators.
Once assigned, additional metadata becomes available (for example, a repository URL for Community plugins), but those fields only describe the classification; they do not create it.
So the answer is:
Plugin authors cannot enable the “Community plugin” badge themselves. It is an editorial classification assigned manually by the WordPress.org Plugin Team.
Use of AI
An AI writing assistant was used to create this article. It mainly supported me summarising the long investigation that was conducted.
- For this task I used Codex + ChatGPT Terra 5.6 and the all might
grep. ↩︎