To display the contents of the readme file for my Blipper Widget WordPress plugin, I installed a plugin called WP Readme Parser/Plugin README Parser by David Artiss. This served me well until it didn’t: an error that appeared seemingly from nowhere broke the entire site. (I discovered this when I was trying to fix my completely broken website.) There didn’t seem to be any alternative plugin, so I decided I’d see if I could fix it.
Luckily for me, the plugin code was available on GitHub, so I created a fork and set to work.
The problem was caused by the version of the markdown library included with the plugin being outdated in terms of the version of PHP it supported. Replacing the old code with the latest code from michelf / php-markdown, also on GitHub, fixed the problem.
Once this was done, I swapped tabs for spaces in the plugin files and reduced the indent to 2 spaces from 4. I tidied up the results of this, and made the indenting of if statements consistent.
I noticed that screenshots weren’t being displayed when they were meant to be, so I investigated: an HTTP 403 Forbidden error was returned by WordPress’ servers when queried about files in the WordPress Subversion repository. I’ve disabled this behaviour for now, causing the semantic version to be updated to 2.0.0.
I’ve renamed the plugin Plugin-readme Parser; it is not yet available from the WordPress plugin directory, but I hope it will be soon.
