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
Traditional uptime monitoring answers one narrow question: Did the server respond? Most basic uptime checks request a URL—often the homepage—at regular intervals. If the server returns a successful HTTP status such as 200 OK, the dashboard stays green. If it times out or returns a server error, you receive an alert. That model is useful. … Read more
WordPress Plugins Keep Deactivating at 3 AM? Check the Database There is a specific kind of WordPress problem that can waste an entire afternoon. A plugin deactivates after an update. You reactivate it. Everything looks fine. Then it deactivates again. There may be no fatal error on screen. The site still loads normally for visitors. … Read more
Quick answer: The WordPress debug log records PHP errors, warnings and notices to a file. Turning it on takes three lines in wp-config.php. Reading it usefully means knowing which severity levels matter, which are safe to ignore, and never leaving errors displayed on a live site. The debug log is the closest thing WordPress has … Read more