The talk at WordCamp Ventura was actually called “Top 11 Reasons Your Plugin Was Rejected.” It was supposed to be ten, but Konstantine said “You should make it 11!” and I did but forgot to update the info for him. Bonus reason! You can see all the slides at helf.us/wcventura2014 right now. Video will be up on WordPress.tv soon.
The truth is, there were only two reasons I actually would ever reject your plugin. If you never replied to our emails about any of the other reasons, we’ve probably rejected you. And if you’re claiming to be someone you’re not in a way we can’t prove, we’ve also rejected you. Let me cover the reasons here, for posterity. My slides are fully accessible, but people learn in different ways.
And to understand how I made this list, I use aText to auto-reply to things. I just made a note of which ones I used to most, flipped ’em in reserve order, and thus I had a list.
Trademarks
This is the funny story one where I rejected Facebook because they used a gmail address and a DropBox URL for their plugin. I looked at it, thought they couldn’t possibly be Facebook, rejected, and got egg on my face. I’d do it again, though, because the point here is that if you’re making a plugin for a company and you’re using the company name, you need to make it clear and easily provable that you are them.
If you’re doing contract work for, let’s say Pandora, to make an official plugin, you should make a new account on WordPress.org for that. Pandora-Dev or even just Pandora, using a pandora.com email address of course, and then making the plugin downloadable from pandora.com does a lot to make us think you’re real. If you don’t? I may reject you right away.
Missing readme
Otto used to let me pend a plugin because there was no readme. The number got so high, he made me stop. Now we only do this if you’re acting as a service or calling files remotely. Akismet and Disqus would require a readme, as would Twitter, but “Hello Dalai” would not. Of course you always should make a readme, but we don’t force you to do so.
Phoning Home
Akismet ‘phones home’ to it’s own servers to process your comments as spam or ham. That’s not what I mean here. We don’t permit plugins to phone home to your own server unless they’re acting as a service.
A plugin that simply validates a license and ‘unlocks’ functionality that’s already in the plugin is not a service. A plugin that sends an email or message to your own servers when the plugin is installed and/or uininstalled is also not a service. A plugin that calls out to maxcdn or Amazon S3 for your JS and CSS files is also not a service.
When you call out to another server you’re generally doing one of the following:
- Intentionally tracking the use of your plugin
- Creating an unnedded dependancy on another server being accessible in the interest of ‘controlling’ your css/js/images or keeping your plugin smaller
- Trying to control who uses your plugin
None of those are okay. Think about it as a user. If you’re behind a firewall and can’t access Google (which is not an unrealistic situation), and your plugin requires Google’s version of the html5 shiv script, you just broke your plugin for probably the people who needed it most. Well done.
Don’t do this. Make everything local to your plugin. It will actually run faster.
Updates
Related to phoning home is a plugin who calls back to it’s own servers for updates. Would you be surprised to learn that WordPress.org hosted plugins can already serve updates from WordPress.org? Of course not. You’ve seen that helpful alert on a site before. This is usually a hold over from self-hosting a plugin, or hosting it on Github, but it still needs to be removed.
One of our guidelines is that you actually use the WordPress.org hosting to, you know, host your plugin. It’s not a directory for spamming, it’s for using to deploy too.
Encryption
Using encryption methods like base64() or p,a,c,k,e,r to hide your code or otherwise make it human-unreadable breaks our rule of “No obfuscated code.” It’s fine to compress your code and minify, but it’s not okay to hide it. All code must be human readable for inclusion in this repository.
This is because we feel the spirit of GPL means that anyone can easily look at your code to reverse engineering what it does and expand on it. Easy being subjective of course, but you get the idea. Hiding your code is useless. It doesn’t help the community at all.
GPL
Speaking of… I don’t care your thoughts on GPL. I really don’t. What I care about is this: In order to be hosted on the WordPress.org repository for plugins, every single bit of code in your plugin must be compatible with the GPLv2 (or later) license. This isn’t negotiable, it’s not up for debate. It’s above and beyond what the GPL requires, and we know that. Which is why I just don’t care how you think we’re ‘interpreting the GPL wrong.’ That isn’t my point at all.
You want to be hosted on WordPress.org? Your code must be 100% compatible with GPL. Deal with it.
Calling wp-load or wp-blog-header or wp-config
Including wp-config.php, wp-blog-header.php, wp-load.php, or pretty much any other WordPress core file that you have to call directly via an include is not a good idea and we cannot approve a plugin that does so unless it has a very good reason to load the file(s). It is prone to failure since not all WordPress installs have the exact same file structure.
Usually plugins will include wp-config.php or wp-load.php in order to gain access to core WordPress functions, but there are much better ways to do this. It’s best if you tie your processing functions (the ones that need but don’t have access to core functions) into an action hook, such as “init” or “admin_init”.
If you’re trying to use it because you need to access WordPress functions outside of WordPress, we’d actually much rather you didn’t do that at all. Your plugin should be inside WordPress, only accessible to people who are logged in and authorized, if it needs that kind of access. Your plugin’s pages should be called via the dashboard like all the other settings panels, and in that way, they’ll always have access to WordPress functions.
Security
Sanitize your post calls, sanitize your SQL queries, use the right code, and be smart. Don’t reinvent the wheel. This is the hardest one to get right and we miss a lot of things, but we want all instances where $_POST data is inserted into the database, or into a file, to be properly sanitized for security. And when you’re making database calls, it’s highly important to protect your code from SQL injection vulnerabilities via prepare() or other functions.
This is just hard but we do try very hard to catch them all.
Including your own copy of jQuery
Please stop this.
WordPress includes its own version of jQuery and many other similar JS files. If your code ‘requires’ an older version, fix your code to work with the one that comes with WordPress. Having ‘your own version’ means you run the risk of breaking everyone else’s plugins and themes, which makes you a bad person. Stop it. Use the ones with WordPress. It keeps your code smaller and your plugin smaller. Also if everyone uses the built in ones, then the first time one of you enqueues it, the faster everyone else’s code will run. Really. It’s magic.
Calling wp-content directly
When you hardcode in paths, or assume that everyone has WordPress in the root of their domain, you cause anyone using ‘Giving WordPress it’s own directory’ (a VERY common setup) to break and you make me cry. In addition, WordPress allows users to change the name of wp-content, so you would break anyone who choses to do so.
Oh, and don’t worry about supporting WordPress 2.x or lower. We don’t encourage it nor expect you to do so, so save yourself some time and energy. Remember! If we stop supporting WP 3.8 and older, then people have to upgrade to use our plugins! Everyone wins!
Not answering an email
If you never reply to an email we sent you about why we pending your plugin, yes you got rejected. In order to keep the queue low and manageable, we reject plugins after seven days from our first reply (not your submission). This can also happen if you’re working with one of us on your plugin code and it takes a long time. This happens when a plugin is complicated, or if there’s a language barrier, or if we just can’t understand why you’re not making the changes we asked for.
Did I reject your plugin and you still don’t understand why? Have a weird question about plugins? Ask away in the comments!
