I love that people do it. I hate that they don’t review it.
The number of projects I review, only to find that the author ran a tool like Grunt to combine files, but forgot to go over what the result was is fairly high. And this is a problem when you consider how many times I have to tell people “Your submission still has demo files, test scripts, and other files that aren’t applicable for distribution.” What happens is that people use the very cool auto-scripts and never stop to make sure that everything’s right. They make sure the code works but they don’t remember to clean up the package.
So let’s talk about what should never be in your plugins for WordPress.org
Deployment Scripts
Now I know a lot of people use scripts to copy their code from GitHub to WordPress’s SVN repo, and I think those scripts are great. They’re helpful, they speed up development, and please keep them out of your plugins. Your script should include a note not to distribute itself. I understand why, when you link us to the GitHub default zip, those scripts are in the review package, and that’s okay. But I do sometimes run a sweep through the repository to see how many people are accidentally including those SH files in their plugin packages. You’ve got to remove those. They don’t matter to the final product and without them, your plugin will be smaller.
Demo Folders
Here’s the thing. They don’t matter. A lot of awesome 3rd party tools come with detailed demo files and extensive things you’ll never need. Those demo folders also tend to be where you’ll find all sorts of crazy things like Google Analytics tracking, calls to external resources (like jquery’s JS files), and more. Your users will rarely, if ever, need that sort of thing. They generally don’t notice it, unless you code it into your plugin, at which point you’d be better served by making it look like WordPress.
Test Scripts
Your test scripts don’t need to be in your plugin. They’re cool, to make sure that the code is going to work before you push it, but that code doesn’t need to be in the plugin on my site, does it? No it does not. All automated tests should be separate from your plugin code files. People don’t need to see the Travis checks in the code on their sites. If they’re developers, they’ll go look for them at your code’s home, after all.
Compressed and Uncompressed Files
Pick one. You don’t need both. When you’re talking about a framework or a library, it’s fine to pull in a minified (but not p,a,c,k,e,r compressed) version of the file as your own version. If there’s no need or plan to edit that file (and there shouldn’t be), you can make the plugin smaller. Of course, I feel that if the JS is all of 7 lines, for goodness sake, it’s fine to leave it all human readable.
What Else?
What do people leave in plugin or theme packages that drive you up the wall?
