The team acts as gate-keepers and fresh eyes on newly submitted plugins, as well as reviewing any reported security or guideline violations.
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WordPress 5.2 is due out at the end of April, and wit that release the minimum recommended version of PHPPHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php will be PHP 5.6.
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 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. 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.
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There’s a company who regularly emails people telling them that for $50 or $100 they’ll review your 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. or theme and you’ll get 5 star ratings on WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://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.
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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 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., 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.
