WordPress plugin development

Conventional Commits and git-cliff: a plugin changelog from the commit history The changelog in readme.txt is written at release time, from memory, and it shows: fixes are forgotten, internal refactorings are listed as features. If the commit messages follow a simple convention, a tool can sort them into “Features”, “Fixes” and “Breaking changes” and write…

Custom WP-CLI commands for a plugin’s maintenance tasks Every plugin with real data sooner or later needs tasks that do not belong in the admin: re-sync 20,000 products with an API, rebuild a lookup table, clean up after a failed import. A shell script that chains wp eval calls is fragile. A WP-CLI command of…

PHP 8.3 for WordPress plugin developers PHP 8.3 (November 2023) is a release of small, practical changes: typed class constants, an #[\Override] attribute, json_validate(), dynamic access to class constants and a few deprecations. In mid-2025 it is the version many hosts recommend, so plugins can start to require it, or at least must run on…

Git tags and signed releases for a WordPress plugin A plugin release is a version number in three places (the plugin header, readme.txt‘s “Stable tag”, a constant in the code), a ZIP and, ideally, a tag in git that marks exactly which commit was released. When these drift apart, a support request for “version 2.4.1”…

A monorepo for several WordPress plugins An agency with five plugins and a shared library usually has six repositories. A change in the library means a release of the library, then a Composer update and a pull request in every plugin, and the integration tests run only after all of that. A monorepo puts all…

git cherry-pick: backport a fix to an older plugin branch A plugin has a main branch for version 3 and a release/2.x branch for the customers who still run version 2. A security fix lands on main, and it is also needed in 2.x. Merging main into the old branch would bring all of version…

The WordPress Interactivity API: interactive blocks without React on the front end Blocks are built with React in the editor, but on the front end they are static HTML. For an accordion, a tab group or a “show more” button, every block author used to write their own vanilla JavaScript or ship a framework. Since…

Query Monitor: find what makes a WordPress page slow A slow page has a cause somewhere between the database, PHP code, hooks and external HTTP requests. Query Monitor is a free debugging plugin that shows all of this for the current request in a panel under the admin bar: every database query with its time…

PHP 8.2 in WordPress plugins: readonly classes, DNF types and dynamic properties PHP 8.2 (December 2022) is now the version many hosts offer by default, and it brings one change that produces warnings in old plugin code and three features that make new code cleaner. The warnings come from dynamic properties; the features are readonly…