And yes! I’ve been contributing to WordPress for two years now in the Plugins team. For those who don’t know this team, we are the ones who watch over the security and following of some directives that ensure a healthy ecosystem. I already did a summary of my first year, and it seems like more time has passed since then, but it’s only been one year!
Most of all I have to thank the sponsorship of Hostinger all this year, which sponsors the hours I put in weekly on the team. It is essential to dedicate all this time to this work that I believe is important.
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What is a plugin
According to its formal definition, it would be:
A plugin in WordPress is a software component that integrates with the core system to add new features, modify existing behaviors or connect to external services, using the hooks (actions and filters) that WordPress provides.
But just so everyone understands, it’s about adding functionality to our WordPress site. For me I think it is key in the popularity of Frameworks, to make them extensible and customized to the needs of each project.
And most plugins can be installed from the official WordPress repository, which our team is responsible for.
Many, many, many revisions!!!
I will soon reach 6,000 Plugin reviews done during the time I am sponsored by Hostinger (2024-2025). Without the collaboration it would be impossible to be so dedicated to the team for so long.
It’s a mentally exhausting job, and being my second job, it sometimes costs a little more. But always proud of the work and the results we’re getting.
Lectures in which I have participated
This year, I have also had time to prepare different talks in WordCamps (WordPress conferences) and Meetups, whose purpose is always to share knowledge and help other developers to improve their tools. I’ve been focusing mainly on the Plugin Check Plugin tool, which I’ll talk more about later.
Chats:
- Develop safer WordPress Plugins at WordCamp Malaga
- Create your own WordPress plugin, from scratch or already knowing something at WordCamp Madrid
- Learn about the new tool to make your WordPress Plugin more secure at Meetup Granada
- Contribute to WordPress reviewing Plugins at WordCamp Griñón
Mention in the State of the Word
I have the honor of compiling the statistics that were used in the Plugins team’s State of the Word. We got a special mention thanks to the advancements in the tools we use to review Plugins.
They were used by Matt Mullenveg (WordPress Co-Founder) at the annual event where we do a review of the WordPress project and future developments. The Plugins team was largely forgotten, but for this event we did get our mention. It was a great thrill.
The sentence we helped to prepare was as follows:
Since we launched, we’re seeing 41% fewer issues approved per approved plugin. And teams are approving 138% more Plugins every week. So huge kudos to the Plugins review team for realizing that and putting more plugins in the hands of the community experts.
Matt Mullenveg in State of the Word 2024
The giant photo of the team on stage in Tokyo, made me wonder if I was there…. But I wasn’t…
Involvement in Plugin Check Plugin development
This Plugin is a tool that allows WordPress developers, to make more secure plugins thanks to the different checks it has. This initiative of the Performance team, was created in 2022, and was not made official until 2024.
Since April last year, seeing that the plugin was not progressing, I got involved to review the Pull Requests that were pending, as they needed a second reviewer to finish validating them, and help perform checks that were already done in our internal Scanner, which is mostly taken care of by Fran Torres.
It was a bit of a tortuous path at first, as my role was not understood, which was to help and unlock development. I saw a need to unlock several months of work on the main part of Nilambar and the Performance team.
My work has been primarily focused on:
- Audit all the checks we perform in our Internal Scanner and review which ones can go in the public tool.
- Learn the workflow of the plugin. This cost me quite a bit, as I learned to development with Unitary Tests and BEHAT, and Trunk Based Development.
- Create the tasks to perform checks by the team.
- Propose and advance requirements for wordpress.org to be published
And we got it published on wordpress.org/plugins/developers/add/ on September 17th
Once we got thanks to Chris at WordCamp US, we got the plugin supported so that all submissions to the directory were automatically audited by PCP.
And so, I created the following entry explaining how PCP worked.
Item Closing Year 2024
As I love statistics, I prepared a review of all the reviews done by the whole team during this year 2024. I created an internal tool together with Fran, which analyzes mail conversations with users to see the issues we have detected. I made a chart of what was detected in more quantity.
The detail of everything that was commented on, you can see below in the original post.
Conclusion and Acknowledgements
It has been an exciting year with great professional challenges in which I have learned a great deal.
I have to make a special mention to Fran Torres, fellow traveler and always willing to help by reviewing plugins, and also to Nilambar for his great involvement in the team.
Also thank the rest of the Plugins Team, as I think that although we have a work that is not seen much, but if it did not work, many people would go out on the street with torches (figuratively speaking of course).
We could be like the Internet Plumbers.
What’s left for this next year?
Submissions of new plugins in WordPress, do not stop growing having doubled the previous year. So it’s time to keep doing a lot of revisions and help push the team to keep pushing. There’s no other option!