The email went out last night to everyone with commit access to a pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party.

After testing your plugins and ensuring compatibility, it only takes a few moments to change the readme “Tested up to:” value to 4.6. This information provides peace of mind to users and helps encourage them to update to the latest version.

For each plugin that is compatible, you don’t need to releaseRelease A release is the distribution of the final version of an application. A software release may be either public or private and generally constitutes the initial or new generation of a new or upgraded application. A release is preceded by the distribution of alpha and then beta versions of the software. a new version — just change the stable version’s readme value.

Looking to get more familiar with 4.6? Read this roundup post on the core development blog to check out the changes made to register_meta(), native fonts, persistent comment cache, Customizer APIs, WP_HTTP API, and much, much more: https://make.wordpress.org/core/2016/07/26/wordpress-4-6-field-guide/

Thank you for all you do for the WordPress community, and we hope you enjoy 4.6 as much as we do.

Also, as we’ve been warning for the last two cycles, some plugins have been closed. It’s a requirement that we be able to contact you. We’ve also been pushing back on auto-replies, since they make it impossible for us to tell if there’s a human reading. Frankly, based on the content of the auto-replies, this is the cycle we see:

We email you and receive an auto reply of “A support ticket has been created…” We email a warning “Hey, please remove us from this auto reply…” and we get another auto reply. We don’t reply to that one, but 3 months later when we send another email, the cycle starts anew. This tells us that you are not actually reading your support emails. Which means we have no way to contact you (and your users probably hate you, just FYI). So this time, plugins have been closed.

Your plugin has been closed (or you were removed from a plugin) based on the following criteria:

• If you have auto-replied to our ‘Are your plugin ready?’ email 4+ times, and your plugin has not been updated in 2+ years
• If your email bounced
• If your auto-reply says “I’m on vacation until…” and it’s a invalid future date (example: someone’s out of office said they’d be back August 2014…)
• If your auto-reply said you no longer work at a company
• If your auto-reply says the company no longer exists

If the only valid emails for the plugin meet those criteria, the plugin was closed. If it was only one committer, they were removed and everyone else was emailed and notified.

In all cases we absolutely emailed each and every one of you. I did it myself. I directly contacted over 80 plugins about this situation and expressly told them if their plugins were closed or if people were removed, and why.

If you find your plugin was closed and you didn’t get an email, check spam, because they were all sent. Even to people who auto-replied. Which was really annoying.

#notice, #reminder, #updates