Creating documentation for your plugin is a crucial step, especially if you are developing a plugin for public release.
Some plugin authors, in a hurry to release their plugin, may choose to skip this step, resulting in poor or inadequately prepared 'readme' files. This is bad practice because usually the success of the plugin greatly depends on the available documentation.
To prepare documentation for the public release of a plugin, you need to complete two steps.
Create a plugin
readme.txt
file.Prepare a page on your site (if you do not have a site you can use the WordPress plugin repository instead—we will discuss this later).
The readme.txt
file is a standardized text file describing the plugin functionality, installation and usage manual.
The contents of a readme.txt
file are automatically parsed by the WordPress plugin repository to display a plugin information page that looks like this one: