View the source code of a 3rd party plugin? [closed]

Here are some ways how we can view the .php source code for plugins:

1) via `wp-admin` access:

Visit the Plugins page and press the Edit link beneath the plugin name.

For example if we want to check out the bbPress source:

enter image description here

this link will take us to:

/wp-admin/plugin-editor.php?file=bbpress/bbpress.php

We can also visit the /wp-admin/plugin-editor.php page and select the plugin to edit.

But this will not work if we got:

define ( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true  );

in the wp-config.php file.

I don’t recommend editing plugin files through this editor. If we break something, we might not be able to access it again through the admin pages.

On the server hosting our files, we most likely find the plugins under:

/path/to/your/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/

Note that it’s possible to rename the wp-content directory through code.

We might need to access the server via ftp, sftp, ssh or through some web file managers.

If the plugin is avialable on wordpress.org, we can check out the developers tab.

For bbPress the path is:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbpress/developers/

and here’s the screenshot:

bbPress code

Many plugins are available on GitHub or Bitbucket. Even mirrors for the wordpress.org plugin SVN repository.

If you have the .zip file, you can open it and view the source files from there.

ps: bbPress was just a random plugin that I used for demonstration.