Tag Archives: announcement

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 11:00 am on March 10, 2023
Tags: announcement,   

Advance Notice of Retirement

tl;dr: I will be stepping down from 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 reviews by 1 July, 2023.

I will be stepping down from plugin reviews this year. I have been a part of this team for over a decade (and the rep for the majority of the time) and recognize a departure like this can be confusing, and could cause people jump to a whole lot of assumptions about the why.

This is a personal decision and has nothing to do with my passion for WordPress. It is a 100% personal, non-WordPress related, decision I made long ago (I told the team in July ’22). Suffice to say there is life ‘stuff’ going on and I cannot devote the time I once could to plugin reviews.

Many people have noticed and complained, with varying degrees of empathy, about the sudden uptick in delays with reviews (be they new plugins or security related). Those delays are directly related to that ‘stuff’ going on. I simply am not available as much as I was, and out of fairness to myself and the community, it’s time for me to retire from plugins.

We’re trying to figure out an onboarding doc, some demo plugins to help people test, getting people in a place where they can fill in the gaps. But this is not a fast process. We’ve actually never had real onboarding (I was thrown into the fire when I stepped in), and it’s going to be a challenge get a team to the place where they have as much weird plugin knowledge and gotchas as I have from my 10 years of experience.

There will absolutely be a learning curve for the people who step in after me. Things will be missed, things will be confusing, and mistakes will happen. I ask everyone be kind and patient.

I understand it became a one-woman show and I apologize for not asking for help and stepping down sooner before it became a crisis. At that point, it was impossible to set up a flag for help without causing these kinds of delays. But things like this happen out of your control, even when you plan. None of us expected the world to spiral like it did in 2019/20.

What’s next for me and WordPress? Writing and managing my plugins, developing code, and being around for some questions. I won’t vanish in the night, but after a decade? I think it will be good for us all to have someone fresh in there.

Some quick answers:

  • I’m not sick or dying.
  • We don’t have an announcement of the new rep.
  • We are still working on onboarding and figuring that out.
  • We have reached out to people and they are actively being onboarded right now.

So again, I ask we all please be patient with all the changes coming. Once we sort out onboarding, we hope to be able to invite even more people, just like you, to the team!

#announcement, #team-reps

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:37 pm on December 3, 2017
Tags: announcement,   

Reviewing the Guidelines – 2017

I do this regularly, but recently I received a comment that the guidelines were still too vague.

I need to stress that this is by intent. If we make guidelines like “You can only have 3 external links” then people will find ways to exploit that. However I do not think that guidelines are perfect. Which is why I’m proposing a minor update to them to address the following concerns:

  • Overall tense of guidelines made consistent
  • Update introduction for readability and unpack what we mean by keeping email updated
  • Explain the converse of 3
  • Put the important part of 5 on top
  • Add link to forum guidelines to 9
  • Add prohibition against harassment to anyone in WP
  • Clarify self-dismissible alerts are acceptable in 11
  • Changed tense of 12 and 13 to emphasize their importance
  • Grammar fix for title of 15
  • Fix reference to zips in 16 (upload now vs link to)
  • Reword title of 17 to explain that PLUGINS must honor…
  • Guideline 18 has received a full rewrite to clarify what rights we reserve and reiterate our promise to do this as fairly as possible.

You can see all the changes proposed here on GitHub

Please read the guidelines and leave comments or pull requests on GithubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/. The plan is to make these live in January 2018 so please jump in and help! Thanks.

#announcement, #guidelines

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 5:05 pm on September 7, 2017
Tags: announcement   

SWFUpload To Be Removed From Core

Removing SWFUpload

If 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 using SWFUpload, please remove it and switch to Plupload. If you’re a security plugin scanning for it, you’re fine. If your plugin is using it, or including your own, it’s time to upgrade.

#announcement

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 7:32 pm on August 15, 2017
Tags: announcement   

x-post: Community Conduct Project Kick-off Meeting

Community Conduct Project – Kick off meeting scheduled for 17:00 UTC on the 5th September 2017

#announcement

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 9:59 pm on May 16, 2017
Tags: announcement   

SVN Status: Seems to be Okay

I know Dion mentioned it in a comment, but here’s the official… We think it’s okay now post (I delayed to be more sure).

The SVNSVN Short for "SubVersioN", it's the code management system used to maintain the plugins hosted on WordPress.org. It's similar to git. sync stuff SEEMS to be okay. The main issues appear to be sorted out, so 🤞🏾

We’re keeping a close eye on it, but please do remember to be nice to our poor system 🙂

#announcement

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 6:03 pm on May 11, 2017
Tags: announcement   

Repository Syncing Issues (Updated)

Update from Otto: “The brunt of the 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-delay problem has been solved now, so plugins should be nice and speedy again. There may be a few stragglers that got rescheduled for later due to the overload, they will clear themselves up in the next couple hours.”

Due to a network issue in the wee hours of May 11, updates to SVNSVN Short for "SubVersioN", it's the code management system used to maintain the plugins hosted on WordPress.org. It's similar to git. are taking longer than normal to show up on the directory. The issue created a 2 hour backlog, which normally would work itself out pretty quickly. It’s currently being exacerbated by everyone who sees their code NOT showing up right away and pushing it again.

As Otto says:

In short, when it’s being slow, then it’s being slow and nothing you can do will speed it up, so just relax, go outside, walk around, and wait for it.

Do we want to make the process faster? Of course. And if you’re interested in helping that, please check out Meta ticket #1578 to understand how it was all written for the new directory.

To remind you:

  • Changes can take a couple hours to display even on the good days. While it is generally much shorter, 6-12 hours is about when you should start wondering if something’s up, not before.
  • Multiple commits to SVN means multiple builds of your code. The more times you commit, the more builds, and the slower it goes for everyone. Commit once, then go make a sandwich.
  • Zips are built for for every tag’d release in your repository. Fewer tags, faster builds. We advocate removing older builds as they’re generally not necessary for use.
  • Patience, patience, patience. With over 60k plugins (counting the closed ones), this is a HUGE database of things.

#announcement

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 6:25 pm on May 4, 2017
Tags: announcement   

2016 in Review

It’s May. I forgot to post this. Go on and laugh 🙂

Anyway. At the end of last year, I looked at all the posts on Make/Updates and manually crafted out a spreadsheet that listed all the plugins submissions, rejections, approvals and closures. And here’s how the year looked:

image

If you don’t want to calculate it all yourself, I’ve made my Google sheet sharable. I didn’t go back and do 2015, and while I do plan to do one for 2017, we will have a big gap in numbers as I don’t have a way to calculate closed plugins at the moment.

By the way, there was a higher number of closed plugins in 2016 than ever before. That’s because more people than ever have asked us to close plugins, but also because we closed plugins without a committer with a valid email address. And that was a lot of people.

#announcement

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein) 4:07 pm on March 28, 2017
Tags: announcement   

The New Directory Is (Mostly) Live

Sorry about the post-facto notice, there were a lot of moving parts and we got some things out of order when communicating between the multiple teams.

Current Status

  • Pending plugins are imported
  • Approved (but not yet committed) plugins are being imported
  • Rejected plugins have not yet been imported (though they will be … all 23k of them)

Known Issues

Beside everything listed on Meta Trac, we are aware of the following issues:

  • HeaderHeader The header of your site is typically the first thing people will experience. The masthead or header art located across the top of your page is part of the look and feel of your website. It can influence a visitor’s opinion about your content and you/ your organization’s brand. It may also look different on different screen sizes. images are pixelated
  • 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 submissions are disabled

Plugin Submissions are Currently Closed

THERE ARE NO PLUGIN APPROVALS GOING ON AT THIS TIME

You can’t submit a new one for approval, and we won’t be approving anything until possibly tomorrow at the earliest.

I will post here (make/plugins) as soon as we reopen and start things moving along, but please don’t ask for a status update. If it’s not posted here, we don’t have one, and you’ll just make everything take longer.

Plugins Will No Longer Be Rejected After Seven Days

Before you panic, we’re not going to reject plugins after 7 days anymore. The queue will be handled differently so having old plugins with no replies is less of a problem. Also? We’ll be able to rename your plugin slug before approval, so that will take care of most things like `google-analytics-by-faro` 😁 and other obvious typos.

However. This means the onus is now even more on you to make sure you whitelist emails from `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/` in your email servers. A high volume of people never see the first email (the ‘please fix’) and only see the followup of 7-days, so now you won’t be getting that anymore.

#announcement