David Perez 7:30 am on July 12, 2025  

Team Name Change to “Plugins Team”

Since the team transition that took place in June 2023, the goals 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. Review Team have continued to grow. This change has been internally agreed upon, and we’re excited about the new name.

Here’s a quick summary of our main focus areas:

Review of New Plugin Submissions to the Directory

This has remained our primary task and takes up most of our time. We’re now receiving over 87% more weekly plugin submissions. Our goal is to keep the queue as short as possible and ensure a balanced workload across the team.

Improvement of Internal Tools

The Scanner tool has undergone major upgrades, now performing over 220 automated checks on plugins. This makes the review process more efficient and reliable. We’ve also introduced AI checks for plugin names, helping ensure clear and trademark-compliant naming from the start.

Creation and Improvement of Community Tools

Since Plugin Check Plugin was introduced to the community, it’s become increasingly integrated into workflows, helping plugin authors self-review their plugins and boosting the overall quality and security of the WordPress ecosystem.

The team is now actively contributing to its development, adding new checks, and we’re proposing to use it during plugin updates and commits as well.

Improvement of the Plugin Directory

We’ll be working closely with the MetaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team to help review open tickets and propose new features we believe will improve plugin reliability and security.

We’ve come to feel that the name “Plugin Review Team” no longer reflects everything we do. That’s why we’re proposing a simplified name: “Plugins Team.” Interestingly, the Themes Team made a similar change some time ago.

So we propose updating the name across various community spaces:

  • Page Title: https://make.wordpress.org/plugins/
  • Mentions across 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/ websites
  • Community references: Moving forward, we kindly ask the community to refer to us as the Plugins Team.

We believe this small change is well deserved, given all the efforts the team has made to improve the WordPress plugin ecosystem. We’re looking forward to continuing to grow and evolve.

Post written by @davidperez, reviewed by @frantorres and @rabmalin

Jonathan Desrosiers 1:58 am on June 25, 2025
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X-post: A Little (Late) Spring Cleaning

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Isotta Peira 1:06 pm on June 23, 2025
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Jonathan Desrosiers 11:49 am on June 4, 2025
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X-post: Criteria for Creating or Migrating Repositories under the WordPress GitHub Organization

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Francisco Torres 9:36 am on May 29, 2025
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Plugins Team at WCEU 25 | Contributor Day

WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe 2025 is coming soon and we will have several tables dedicated to the plugins team in the contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/!

A big part of the team will be at Basel and we are ready to carry out different activities according to the interests of the community present there.

Our main topics for the contributor are:

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. Check Plugin

Learn how it works and how to contribute to the project that is helping plugin authors to check their plugins for different kinds of possible issues.

Prepare for the event in advance:

Documentation

Help out contributing to the documentation by detecting areas not covered by the current documentation and contribute suggesting changes to it.

Prepare for the event in advance:

Handbook

Learn about the best practices for developing plugins for WordPress.

Prepare for the event in advance: Gather your questions!

General talk

Talk among the community about questions regarding the directory, how the team works, guidelines, etc.

Prepare for the event in advance: Get familiar with the Plugin Directory Guidelines.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

#contributor-day

Francisco Torres 7:19 pm on May 26, 2025  

Announcing the Next Plugin Review Team Reps

We’re happy to announce that @davidperez and @frantorres are stepping in as the next team reps for the 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/ 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. Review Team!

Plugin team reps help coordinate the team’s duty, coordinate communication with the community, and ensure important updates and community activities stay on track.

Over the past two years, the new team has made important progress — incorporating new members, reducing the plugin queue, creating and improving tools, streamlining the reviews and refining processes — thanks to the collective effort of everyone involved.

Looking ahead, the team is preparing to tackle new challenges, which we believe will include: the impact of AI, further tool enhancements, proactive reviews, and improving documentation.

A big thank you to the entire team for their dedication, to the contributions through the “Five for the future” program and to all plugin authors for keeping their plugins secure, compatible, and compliant. Together, we are evolving the WordPress plugin ecosystem!

David Perez 5:16 pm on May 21, 2025  

The WordPress Ecosystem is Growing: New Plugin Submissions Have Doubled in 2025

This year, the number of plugins submitted has grown by 87% compared to last year

🌱 We have great news from the Plugins team. The submission of new plugins in WordPress has almost doubled this year, helping the WordPress ecosystem to grow.

The WordPress developer community is celebrating as they maintain and increase their submissions to be reviewed and published in the WordPress directory.

As you can see in the graph below, we detected this increase since last September, and we can observe the impact of AI as well as achievements made by the team, such as having automated tools and improvements to the internal Scanner, which, in our view, have contributed to the rise in 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 to the official directory.

The Rise of AI 🤖 in the Plugin Directory

🤓 It’s clear that AI is influencing plugin submissions to the directory. Here, we analyze plugins that have “AI” in their title, showing the use of Artificial Intelligence integrated into WordPress.

As seen in this chart, growth is exponential, with many plugins directly using AI to offer features within the directory.

If we were to group them by functionality and ordered by number of submissions, we’d have these categories:

💬 Chatbots / Virtual Agents
✍️ Content Generators
🛒 Ecommerce / WooCommerce
🔍 SEO
🖼️ Multimedia Generation (images, 3D, etc.)
📝 Forms / Inputs
✨ Summaries / Highlights
❓ FAQ / Q&A Generators
🌐 Translation / Multilingual
🏷️ TaxonomyTaxonomy A taxonomy is a way to group things together. In WordPress, some common taxonomies are category, link, tag, or post format. https://codex.wordpress.org/Taxonomies#Default_Taxonomies. Management (categories/tags)
📋 Titles and Metadata

We highly appreciate developers betting on WordPress to include Artificial Intelligence and improve integration and functionalities for users.

The Impact of AI on Plugin Development

Artificial intelligence has become a key tool to speed up and improve plugin development in WordPress. From writing code to generating ideas, here are some standout ways AI is helping:

  • Code Assistance: AI tools assist developers by providing contextual suggestions, code snippets, and guidance on the use of WordPress-specific functions, hooksHooks In WordPress theme and development, hooks are functions that can be applied to an action or a Filter in WordPress. Actions are functions performed when a certain event occurs in WordPress. Filters allow you to modify certain functions. Arguments used to hook both filters and actions look the same. and APIs.
  • Code Debugging and Review: AI can analyze your code and suggest improvements for performance, security, or WordPress standards compliance. It can help understand Plugin Check Plugin warnings and offer specific solutions.
  • Auxiliary Content and Documentation: Automatically generate parts of documentation, FAQs, changelogs, or tutorials for end users.

Improvements to the Team’s Internal Scanner

We’ve upgraded our internal tool focusing on three pillars: better detection, more examples, and AI integration.

We revamped the tool that assists our manual reviews by catching more issues and checking more detection points, while customizing examples to make it easier for developers to find solutions.

Remember, the main security issues stem from lack of sanitization, escaping, and nonce usage.

Finally, we’ve added AI to detect duplicate or similar plugin names in the directory, making the team more productive.

Free Tool for WordPress Developers

Since last year, we have the Plugin Check Plugin tool, which lets you review your own plugin. Plugin Check Plugin is an official tool that automatically checks if your plugin meets 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/ directory requirements and best practices.

More info is available in the detailed introductory post.

Since September 2024, Plugin Check Plugin has been integrated for automatic reviews directly on WordPress.org, improving review speed and reducing issues by 41% when approving a plugin.

Team Effort: Less Average Waiting Time

Even though we’ve received twice as many new plugin submissions, we should applaud the team’s dedication to keeping the time for first reviews low.

A short waiting time for plugin review encourages developers to publish in the directory and offers many advantages:

  • Faster publishing cycle: Less time between idea and public availability.
  • Better developer experience: Less waiting to validate ideas reduces frustration, increases motivation, and strengthens the WordPress community.
  • Incentive to innovate more: Our community becomes more competitive with an agile process, encouraging experimentation and initial version releases.

This year, we are also managing to keep the average waiting time for the first review at a minimum. We work hard every day to maintain this commitment and avoid long delays that could discourage new plugin development.

This post was written by @davidperez and reviewed by @frantorres and @rabmalin

Jonathan Desrosiers 1:11 pm on March 4, 2025
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Francisco Torres 4:31 pm on February 20, 2025
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Plugin author now linked to WordPress.org profiles

The way 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. author information is displayed in the directory has changed; it’s now linked to the plugin owner’s public 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/ profile.

We refer to the field that is displayed under the plugin title and is preceded by either a icon depicting a person or the text ‘By’, this represents the author of the plugin.

A screenshot of what the plugin information looks like in the plugin listings of the directory.
A screenshot of what the plugin information looks like in the header of a single plugin page.

Who’s the author?

Previously

This value was taken from the plugin’s headers, from the “Author” and “Author URI” fields.

This made it possible for plugin authors to display any name and link to any website.

Now

This value is taken directly from the plugin owner’s profile. It shows the owner’s display name as set on their WordPress.org profile and a link to their profile.

This way, the plugin attribution you see is directly linked to the plugin owner’s WordPress.org profile.

FAQ

Can plugins pages still include external links?

Yes, as long as those links do not contravene the guidelines. External links can be included in the readme file so that they’re displayed on the plugin page, and plugin authors can also add links on their WordPress.org profile page.

Does this change apply retroactively to existing plugins?

Yes, this is a change to the way it is displayed throughout the directory.

Can multiple authors be credited for a single plugin?

While only the plugin owner’s display name and profile will be shown under the plugin title, multiple contributors can still be listed on the “Contributors & Developers” section. This can be set in the “Contributors” field in the plugin’s readme file.

Can plugin teams still list their company / team / group / brand name instead of a personal profile?

Yes, a company/team/group/entity can have one account to manage their plugins, In this case, they should consider the following:

  • Accounts belonging to a company/team/group/entity are not allowed to participate in forums. Community forums are a space for people, not companies or groups. Members can have personal accounts to participate in forums. They can be added as Support Reps in the advanced section of the plugin.
  • All plugins owned by a company/team/group/entity must be under the same account. This means that if they have 8 plugins, those 8 plugins must be under the same account, not under different accounts. When having different brands, you will need to decide what you want to display on all plugins, and users will be able to see all plugins published under that name.

I need to change how the author is displayed, what can I do?

If the plugin is associated with the correct WordPress.org account, you can simply change the display name in your WordPress.org profile.

If this is not the case, you can transfer your plugin to another account. Just remember that if you have multiple plugins, you are expected to transfer all of them so that they are owned by one account (see the previous FAQ for more information).

#directory

David Perez 4:05 pm on December 31, 2024  

A Year in the Plugins Review Team – 2024

It’s been a transformative year of growth in the WordPress Plugins Directory, particularly as the Plugins Team welcomed several new members onboard. Throughout this time, we remained focused on our primary goals: enhancing security, improving the review process, and fostering community engagement.

Our security efforts have focused on creating tools to benefit all developers, including the introduction of mandatory 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. Check for new plugin submissions, 2FA in SVNSVN Short for "SubVersioN", it's the code management system used to maintain the plugins hosted on WordPress.org. It's similar to git. and our renovated Internal Scanner Tool. These features, detailed here, enhance security and streamline the submission process. Additionally, the SVN Password feature has become a critical measure to prevent account theft and related issues.

When it comes to reviews, it remains our most time-intensive task, reflecting our commitment to maintaining quality and trust within the Plugins directory.

Since September 2023, the plugin review queue—once around 1,300—has seen significant improvements thanks to enhanced tools, refined workflows, and better submissions. In October 2024, the queue even briefly hit zero. The Plugin Check plugin has been key, enabling developers to improve code quality and security pre-submission, which in turn has sped up reviews. Over the past year, 2,983 plugins have been approved, and the number of reviews required per plugin has increased. That means that we now detect more issues per plugin.

The Plugin Check plugin has significantly reduced the time for reviews, bringing the average wait time down from 37 weeks to 9 weeks, even as plugin submissions have almost doubled. In the past year, we’ve reviewed 7,382 plugins—59,1% more than the previous year—while detecting more issues through both automated and manual reviews than ever before. This has resulted in faster, more thorough reviews despite the increased volume of submissions.

We have continued refining our Internal Scanner tool, a magnificent legacy created by Mika Epstein, to streamline reviews and boost productivity. Recent updates, encompassing over 400 commits, include new checks for issues like sanitize and escape, along with enhanced examples and personalized guides to help plugin authors effectively resolve identified issues.

The tool now features over 200 checks, detecting a wide range of potential security-related issues while also supporting reviewers in conducting thorough manual reviews.

The issues highlighted in the chart below account for approximately 80% of all issues detected.

For more reading about these and other common issues, you can click here.

With regard to improving the plugin development community, we have focused on migrating and maintaining the Developer Handbook to 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 by the repository owner. https://github.com/ which can now accept contributions. 

The team is also participating in the Plugins tables at various contributor days at WordCamps, helping and encouraging users to create their plugins whilst using WordPress best practices.

We will aim to do this type of review each year, and until the next one, please remember to use Plugin Check! Adding it to your development workflow will save you effort, and countless hours. As our roadmap outlines, we promise to increase its capacity, and usefulness.

Post written and reviewed by @janmtm @chriscct7 @frantorres @davidperez