The plugin review team has amended guideline number nine which states, developers and their plugins must not do anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive, to include the following statement: Implying that a plugin can create, provide, automate, or guarantee legal compliance Mika Epstein, a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team, says the change was…
Chip Bennett has outlined a list of proposed changes and revisions to the WordPress Theme Review guidelines. The changes are listed in two sections, required and recommended. The required changes would take effect immediately while those that are recommended could become guidelines in the future. Some of the recommendations include: Bundled Plugins: Themes must not…
Chip Bennett announced on the Make.WordPress.org website that the theme review guidelines have been updated. Specifically, the theme unit tests have been reduced from required, to recommended. This change was inspired by a passionate conversation, started by Lance Willett. In that conversation they debated whether or not guidelines were hard and fast rules.
Last year at this time, Justin Tadlock announced that he would be conducting an experiment on ThemeForest. The goal of the experiment was to see if it was possible to get other theme authors to write better code and enable better compatibility with the thousands of other themes and plugins for WordPress. Justin has now…
There has been a new post published on the WordPress Events site that outlines a set of proposed guidelines for non-WordCamp events that are created by previous WordCamp organizers. With at least two previous WordCamp organizers putting on their own events this year outside of the WordCamp name, these guidelines are necessary to make sure…
In-depth article by Siobahn McKeown that breaks down how commercial plugin developers are monetizing their efforts through the WordPress.org plugin respository. The article covers the guidelines that plugin authors should follow, examples of successful plugins as well as plugins that didn’t meet the guidelines, and various ideas plugin authors can try. One of the things…
The hot topic in the community over the weekend was a post published by WPCandy.com that talks about the DevPress deal for WordCamp Organizers going down in flames thanks to the WordCamp Guidelines, specifically dealing with giveaways. Unfortunately, the way in which the WordCamp Central team went about correcting the issue blew up in a…
Mark Jaquith has published his tongue in cheek version of guidelines that plugin authors should NOT DO or else the plugin would end up being removed. The list is not comprehensive and does not include all situations in which a plugin would be removed but the advice Mark gives at the end of the post…
Chip Bennett has an interesting post on his site that shows results of an audit he performed on some of the most popular plugin authors to see if they declared what license the plugin is under within the plugin in the form of a license.txt file or from within the plugin header. As we’ve found…
Before the September 3rd WordPress development meeting took place, Mark Jaquith added some interesting items to the meeting agenda that specifically addressed commercial plugin authors and the guidelines of the repository. Mark had conversed with Matt Mullenweg and the decision was that there was not much to talk about. Matt and I had a chat…
Douglas Hanna works for Automattic as a “Communications Engineer”, where he spends most of his time working running the WordPress Showcase and supporting WordPress.com users. He blogs about customer service at Service Untitled and occasionally uses Twitter as well. You probably knew that WordPress could be used as a CMS for a simple content website,…