Tag: plugins

Ending support for some little-used WordPress plugins

Today I am making these three little-used WordPress plugins that I created inactive, in the sense that I will no longer update them, test them against newer versions of WordPress, or provide support for them. If after a time no one else wants to take over maintaining them, they will be closed.

Each plugin has around 10 or fewer active installations and minimal or no user reviews. Given that it takes time to test each plugin I maintain for upcoming WordPress releases and PHP changes, and to support any inquiries or feature requests they may receive, I have to balance the requirements of continuing that work against the value each plugin offers. In these cases, I’d like to free up that maintenance time for other things.

I will leave the GitHub repos public indefinitely in case anyone wants to fork them or take them over.

This change does not affect the other WordPress plugins I maintain.

If you’re interested in taking over responsibility for one or more of these plugins, please contact me.

Thanks to everyone who tried them out and gave feedback along the way.

Testing my WordPress plugins in preparation for WordPress core releases

A couple times per year, WordPress plugin authors and owners get an email like this one:

WordPress 5.6 is imminent! Are your plugins ready?

You’re receiving this email because you have commit access or ownership of existing, open plugins hosted on WordPress.org. The next release of WordPress, 5.6, is scheduled for 08 December 2020.

We would like you to take this time to review your existing plugins and ensure their ongoing compatibility with WordPress. Once you’ve done so, you can update the readme “Tested up to:” value to 5.6. This information provides peace of mind to users and helps encourage them to update WordPress.

Here are the current “Tested up to:” values for each of your plugins:

The message goes on from there to list the plugins I’m responsible for and some notes and details about what’s new in the upcoming WordPress release.

In case it’s not clear, this is an important moment because the authors of tens of thousands of WordPress plugins are being asked to help ensure that when the many millions of WordPress sites out there upgrade to the upcoming release, that those sites continue to look and function as expected by their users. It’s an impressive example of how the WordPress developer community works together in the background to help sustain and grow the larger WordPress ecosystem.

For authors of widely used plugins, by the time this email goes out their plugin may already be fully ready, especially if they’ve been following or maybe even contributing to the development of the new WordPress core release. Some plugin authors rightly have an extensive automated test suite in place to confirm that every part of their plugin’s functionality works against the latest beta or release candidate version of the new version before it comes out.

Authors and maintainers of smaller plugins (like me) may not have the same infrastructure set up, and instead need to perform some manual testing of our plugins to ensure they’re ready.

So, here are the steps I follow every major release cycle to make sure my plugins have been tested and are ready for the new version.

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