So You Made a WordPress Plugin — Now What?
Congrats! 🧙♂️ You’ve built a WordPress plugin. Maybe it fixes a tiny annoyance, or maybe it’s going to change the internet as we know it (no pressure). Either way — it’s time to ship it to the big leagues: the WordPress Plugin Directory.
Think of it as the App Store for WordPress — only with more PHP and less drama.
In this blog series, we’ll guide you step-by-step through the magical and mildly annoying process of publishing your plugin, complete with humor, sanity checks, and enough technical know-how to make your plugin shine brighter than your co-worker’s "motivational quote" desktop wallpaper.
Why Publish Your Plugin to the WordPress Directory?
- Fame (sorta): Get your name out there and show off your skills.
- Automatic Updates: Your plugin gets its own little pipeline to users' dashboards.
- Instant Credibility: Being on WordPress.org is like getting the blue checkmark of open-source.
- Free Feedback: People will definitely tell you when something breaks.
What This Series Will Cover (aka The Plugin Chronicles)
Brace yourself for a series of epic proportions:
- This Post: The "Why the heck should I do this?" intro.
- Preparing Your Plugin – Folder structures, best practices, and why you shouldn't name your file
final_final_v2_noob_to_pro.php. - Creating the Readme.txt – Yes, it's boring. Yes, it's required. No, you can't skip it.
- Submitting Your Plugin – How to impress the plugin review team without bribery.
- Setting Up SVN – Because Git is too cool for this party.
- Uploading Assets – Icons, banners, and why first impressions still matter.
- Tagging Versions – The art of pretending you planned version 1.0.
- Pushing Updates – How to gently tell users: "Oops, we fixed that."
- Pro Tips and Common Mistakes – Like forgetting to close your PHP tags. Again.
Each post will be its own adventure, like a plugin-powered Netflix series — except the only chill here is in the error logs.
Stay tuned, plugin slinger! 🚀