How are "Featured" plugins determined?

[sirjonathan]

I tested the 1.1 release today and when I went to add new plugins here's what I saw:

Can someone provide guidance or point to documentation on how what's "Featured" is determined? My best guess at the moment is that it's random and probably periodically reset.

[chuckadams]

As far as I can tell from https://github.com/wordpress/wordpress.org, the featured status is a term in the plugin_section taxonomy attached to the plugin CPT, but I can't find any instance of the string 'featured' or "featured" in the source that's related to setting it. Possibly the plugin review UI has something, but I don't know where that lives. I suspect the flag is just set by hand in the plugin directory's wp-admin or with a one-off script somewhere.

[chuckadams]

It occurs to me that my answer doesn't explain what you're seeing in the plugins list with FAIR enabled, since I thought I was getting a question about how wordpress.org implements it: the short of it is that AspireCloud hasn't really implemented "Featured" at all, and you're seeing a default sort that's not very useful. I think it's literally just sorting by rating, then the natural sort in the database, which is more or less insertion order.

We don't have the staff to decide which plugins to feature, but I can imagine a better way to sort the list to where it'd be similar to Popular, but maybe with more bias to recency (basically "Hot" plugins)

[chuckadams]

See also fairpm/aspirecloud#22