As you may know, I’ve just written my first WordPress plugin some days ago. You guess it, one of the most important steps to popularize a software is preparing a good readme file. With WordPress, a readme file has more than that - WordPress will parse the text in a standardized readme.txt into data to display on the plugin directory page.

Following the instruction, I placed a readme.txt file inside my /trunk/ repository folder. It followed strictly the standard, I can swear this. Here is some texts taken from my readme file:

== Description ==
"Digg This O' Mine" is a plugin that allows you to place the famous ["Digg This" button](http://digg.com/tools/integrate) at the end of your posts, pages, or anywhere at your choice. While it will run out of the box, it has several options that can be used to custom the button to fit your needs [...]
== Installation ==
1. Download and extract the plugin
1. Upload the entire `digg-this-o-mine` folder into to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
[...]
== Frequently Asked Questions ==
= I want to change the background color **inside** the button. How? =
As Digg specifies [here](http://digg.com/tools/integrate), only the background *around* the button is customizable. So until the folks at Digg change their mind, I don't see how [...]
== Screenshots ==
1. The options panel
2. The plugin in action

With this, I expected my plugin repository to show at least 4 tabs: Description, Installation, FAQ, and Screenshots. So it came to me as a sudden to see no tabs shown - except for the default Description taken from the plugin itself, and the “Stats” panel. What the heck?

It was really an annoyance. I googled around and tried many solutions: create a new tags folder and place another readme.txt file there, change readme.txt to README.txt, even copy the content of another working plugin. All was in vain - the stupid tabs just wouldn’t show up.

Well, not until today, when I opened two readme.txt files in Notepad++ at the same time. I noticed that the working one (taken from another good plugin out there) was in UNIX format and encoded in ANSI, when my bad boy was in Windows, UCS2-Big Endian. If was likely the ONLY difference! So I decided to convert my file into UNIX and ANSI (well, I doubt the latter is relevant now, but hell with it). And voilà: the tabs showed themselves up, just like magic!

This turns out to be very simple in the end, but trust me, it was truly a headache. So if you’re encountering something like this, hope this post helps!