Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:20 pm on April 1, 2019
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WordPress To Move to PHP 5.6+

WordPress 5.2 is due out at the end of April, and wit that release the minimum recommended version of PHP will be PHP 5.6.

Minimum PHP Version update

For most plugins this is a non-issue. While we recommend you update your “Requires PHP:†version in your readme.txt, this won’t change the functionality of your code. That field is a minimum version, so if your code works with 7.0 and up, you can set it to `Requires PHP: 7.0` and that will cover 7.1 and 7.2

Also keep in mind, this doesn’t change our policy on PHP versioning, which is to say we still do not have an official version requirement for PHP in your plugins. If you want to support 5.6 forever, feel free. If you want to require 7.1 and up, again, go for it.

You can use a compare to do the basic check: 

version_compare( PHP_VERSION, '5.6', '<' )

And remember the goal for your plugin is “Don’t break things for users.†Stop them from getting fatal errors, and don’t run your plugin if you know it can’t work.

#php

Josepha 10:29 pm on March 29, 2019
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X-post: Weekly Digest | Week 13

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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 3:01 am on March 29, 2019
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X-post: Block metadata in the Plugin Directory

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Josepha 2:05 pm on March 13, 2019
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X-post: Strengths and Challenges: Organization

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Josepha 10:39 pm on March 1, 2019
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X-post: 5.0 Release Retrospective Kickoff

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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:46 pm on February 22, 2019
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Don’t Get Scammed

There’s a company who regularly emails people telling them that for $50 or $100 they’ll review your plugin or theme and you’ll get 5 star ratings on WordPress.org. They’ll tell you that doing this will get you SEO and traffic and they’ll link to their domain as proof of their success.

They’re lying.

Don’t fall for this. Never pay anyone for a review, it’s all a scam and the worst case scenario is that they actually do write a review. Why is that worst? Because if we find out you paid for reviews, we remove your plugins from hosting.

If you got a mail from a certain company offering a Valentine’s sale, know that we already know about them. They’ve been banned from here for years but we’ll be monitoring reviews just in case they slip through.

#reminder

Josepha 5:31 am on February 6, 2019
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X-post: Strengths and Challenges: Follow Up

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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 8:13 pm on January 28, 2019
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Reminder about Behavior

This really shouldn’t need to be said however, based on three recent incidents, it is clear we need a reminder.

You are responsible for your own actions and choices. If you decide to do a thing, you are assuming responsibility for the outcome and, like it or not, the repercussions fall on you and you alone.

When you work with a team of people to support and maintain your plugin, everyone is required to follow the plugin and forum guidelines. Choices made by the team will impact the group as a whole, for good or ill.

Recently a company was banned due to having never briefed their employees on the plugin guidelines. This led to a new, un-monitored employee, egregiously violating the guidelines, harassing and abusing the volunteers of the forums as well as the end-users, who were just trying to get help with the plugin.

The company had been warned about this kind of behaviour before. In fact, they had been issued a final warning. As this was a repeat of the exact behaviour they’d been warned on, their plugin was closed and the company prohibited from hosting anymore.

Sadly this isn’t the only time that’s happened in the last 4 months.

If you work with a team of people, the company/group is responsible for each other. If one person in your group/company violates the guidelines, it’s the whole group who will suffer as you’ve demonstrated an inability to manage your team. The same is true if a rogue intern or SEO marketer spams the forums. They’re doing those actions in the name of the company, which makes the company accountable for their actions.

Don’t hire random people from companies like Fourer to do your marketing. Don’t let people loose in the forums without making sure they understand the guidelines and our expectations.

Abuse, name calling, harassment, stalking, and spamming the forum moderators is not permitted behaviour by anyone. Users are banned for this, and developers will find their companies and all plugins similarly removed. We feel it’s unfair of people to put the burden of monitoring and managing their team on the volunteers of the forums and the plugin team. This is especially true of companies.

Please make sure the people who work with you understand not just the guidelines, but the stakes. Quite often we find an enthusiastic intern is the cause of sockpuppeting, or a well-meaning SEO consultant who took the wrong lessons to heart and made a readme filled with spam.

If we have to contact you multiple times about your behaviour, or that of the people you’re working with, we’re simply not going to permit you to use our services any longer.

#guidelines, #policy, #reminder

Josepha 2:35 pm on January 22, 2019
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X-post: Our Strengths and Challenges

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Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:28 pm on December 31, 2018  

Year End Summary – 2018

Well 2019 is almost here so it’s time to look at a years worth of plugin reviews.

Everything

Here’s the chart of everything for the whole year. That gap in January-March is due to a snafu in the system. It wasn’t properly recording anything, so we weren’t able to collect stats.

Highs and Lows

Due to the above gap, our ‘least’ for the weeks are a little off, but you’ll get the general idea of how much we review a week:

Requested Rejected Closed Approved Pending
Most / week 281 99 1171 149 730
Least / week 101 2 9 36 566
Average / week 164 21 341 87 651
YEAR TOTAL 7095 1062 13034 3752 566

What it Means?

We can see that roughly 52% of all submitted plugins are actually approved.

Why are only about half of all plugins approved? I could give you a lot of math explanations, but the crux of it is this: people don’t reply to emails.

Around 35-40% of plugin submissions are pended, either for more information or for code issues, and the majority of those simply never finish a review.

This year, though, we have an abnormally high number of closed plugins (see those gold spikes). This comes from a lot of cleanup of unused plugins (ones where code was never committed) as well as plugins with email-bounces. Due to GDPR, many email servers changed their reporting so we’re finally getting some accurate data on bounced emails.

Of the closed plugins, about .003% of developers reached out to us about them, and of those, the majority were because emails were out of date. This is why I’m always harping on people to make sure their account emails work and don’t auto-reply or bounce.

If your email bounces, we’re not going to email you or hunt you down to figure out who’s supposed to own a plugin. It’s not an efficient use of our time for people who aren’t maintaining their accounts. We’re aware it’s not very nice, but since our accuracy rate is well into the 99th percentile, it’s more effective to close the plugin.

What’s the take away from this? Check your emails. If you submitted a plugin and didn’t get an automatic reply telling you it was received and what the plugin slug was, then you’re having trouble getting our emails and you should add plugins@wordpress.org to your email’s never-spam list. If you did get that email, count 7 days from that. You will have another email from us by then, either as an approval or a rejection (which always comes with a reason why).