One of the appeals of just about any blogging service, especially one you can install in your own hosting space, is the ability to really make it your own. Whether you have to hack and slash through PHP by hand or you can enjoy the luxury of a vast plugin community, it just feels a little more like a (digital) home when you can put your spin on your own blog. WordPress has just such a booming plugin community, but until now, they've never had their own true resource for posting and downloading plugins. Thanks to the new, official WordPress Plugin directory, the days of aimlessly googling for a plugin to do this or that are a thing of the past. Granted it has a ways to go before it can be called 'comprehensive,' but this is exactly what WordPress has needed for quite some time now. Three columns on the main directory site tell visitors which plugins are popular, fresh out of the oven or recently updated, with a Featured Plugin area front and center to host the flavor of the day. Plugin authors can easily add their plugins to the database via this form, and all the WordPress crew ask is that plugins be GPL Compatible. The only gripe we have so far is that there's no RSS feed for the plugin directory itself. Kind of ironic for a blogging engine, no?

[via digg]