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A few days ago, Otto announce the launch of a new Make-Meta blog for collaborating on new features & improvements for WordPress.org at annual WordPress community Summit. The WordPress community summit is currently going on in Tybee Island, Georgina.

One of the announcements was the addition of a new feature: Reviews for Plugins and Themes. This is a great neat feature that would be very helpful for WordPress users. This is really useful because previously users were not accountable, they will give 1 star and leave. Now a user must review in order to make their review rating count.

To add or see the reviews, visit a theme or plugin in the directory you will see a new tab has been added for “reviews”. Here’s a sample review page of Twenty Twelve WordPress theme.

Otto introduced the new reviews feature on the Make Meta blog as follows:

Communication is important, and “support” is only half of the equation. Feedback is critical, and hopefully, the new Reviews system will go a long way to improving communication between the many millions of users of code we host on WordPress.org and the many thousands of contributors who write the themes and plugins that we all use every day. And all reviews go into our forums and can be commented on by everybody, just in case somebody needs some extra help.

The review feature is really nice because it will prevent anonymous users to leave 1 star rating. Normally a user can give any rating to any plugin or theme, but now they would need to leave a review in order to rate the plugin. Review feature is really useful especially for plugin / theme authors, with the user reviews the developer will get the feedback to help them improve the product.

Over the next few weeks reviews will get some CSS improvements and additional features based on the feedback.

What do you think of this new review feature? I would love to hear your thoughts!