jennpardee Quick answer: Major AI companies now run separate bots for separate jobs: one to gather training data, one to build a search index, and one to fetch pages when a user asks. They have different user agents so you can treat them differently. Blocking the training crawler doesn’t have to mean disappearing from AI search, … Read more
Quick answer: Every bot that visits your site is run by someone who expects to get something from it: a search index, training data, an answer for a user, competitive intelligence, or a way in. Knowing what each one wants, and what it gives back, is the only sensible basis for deciding which to welcome, … Read more
Quick answer: Most overnight traffic on a typical WordPress site isn’t people. It’s search crawlers, AI crawlers, uptime monitors, SEO tools, link-preview fetchers, and scanners probing for weak spots. Most are harmless and some are useful, but your analytics probably can’t see any of them, which is why their side effects look like mysteries. Open … Read more
I was assembling a new plugin — six classes, a loader, the usual structure. It installed. It activated. No errors, no warnings, nothing in the log. It also did absolutely nothing. No admin menu, no hooks registered, no classes defined. As far as WordPress was concerned the plugin was active and healthy. As far as … Read more
I’m building an agency dashboard for my monitoring plugin. The shape is simple to describe: the free plugin runs on however many client sites, and each of those sites pushes its health reports to a central hub — a separate premium plugin the agency installs on a WordPress site of their own. Which means N … Read more
I priced my plugin’s Pro tier at $34.99 a year. That felt right — it’s in line with what comparable WordPress plugins charge, it’s low enough not to require a purchase decision, and it’s a number I’d pay without thinking about it. Then I sat down to plan customer acquisition and worked out what it … Read more
Every AJAX handler in my plugin had a nonce check. Every one of them also verified manage_options. I’d been deliberate about that from the start, and when I sat down to do a security pass before submitting to WordPress.org, I expected it to be a formality. It wasn’t. I found two high-severity issues and one … Read more
You wrote the plugin. You submitted it. After some back-and-forth on the name and a rejection or two, you got the approval email with your repository URL — and then you discovered that WordPress.org runs on Subversion, which you have possibly never used, and the official documentation assumes you have. I hadn’t. I’ve been building … Read more
I built a plugin to solve a problem I kept hitting on client sites. It detects database errors, plugin mass-deactivations, 404 floods, and PHP errors, and it reports them in plain English instead of stack traces. I tested it, I wrote the readme, I packaged it up, and I submitted it to the WordPress.org plugin … Read more
If you landed here from a rejection email that says plugin_updater_detected, skip to the second section. You don’t need to gut your SDK and you don’t need to build a second plugin. If you’re earlier than that — considering Freemius for a plugin you intend to list on WordPress.org — read the whole thing first. … Read more