Sending a plugin to the Wordpress Plugin Directory

I'm the creator of the Perfecty Push Notifications plugin. This is a Wordpress Plugin that has a built-in Push API notification integration. You can send push notifications for free, without any third-party dependencies and you retain the data in your server.

Publish time! 🤞

Once I decided it was the right time to publish it in the Wordpress Plugin Directory, I reviewed it again using the detailed plugin guidelines, bundled it and finally uploaded the .zip file to https://wordpress.org/plugins/developers/add/

This was the first step towards publishing the side project I've been recently working on, so I was excited and panicked at the same time. Would it work? What would they complain about the plugin? Would it never take off?

One day later I got an email with a considerable list of recommendations from them:

I will list what those issues were. You can take a quick look at the MR that addresses them here:

https://github.com/rwngallego/perfecty-push-wp/commit/0c9f4e6b7aed12ff0a81b20896f9235663066a4f

Calling files remotely

For the admin area, I'm drawing a simple stat chart using Chart.js.

I initially thought it was not necessary to include it as an enqueued javascript but as a simple direct inline import in the HTML.

<script  
 src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/Chart.js/2.9.4/Chart.bundle.min.js"
 integrity="sha512-SuxO9djzjML6b9w9/I07IWnLnQhgyYVSpHZx0JV97kGBfTIsUYlWflyuW4ypnvhBrslz1yJ3R+S14fdCWmSmSA=="
 crossorigin="anonymous">
</script>

However, that's not what is suggested in the plugin guidelines, calling third-party systems, so I had to bundle the min.js file with the plugin and mention it in the README.txt:

wp_enqueue_script(
  'chartjs',
  plugin_dir_url( __FILE__ ) . 'js/chart.bundle.min.js',
  array( 'jquery' ),
  $this->version,
  false );

This plugin uses the [Chart.js](https://www.chartjs.org/) library for the admin stats charts.

Data Must be Sanitized, Escaped, and Validated

This is related to this admin page:

I am relying on the well-known WP_List_Table API implementation and honestly didn't catch it, so it was a nice find from them:

perfecty-push-wp/admin/class-perfecty-push-admin-notifications-table.php:118: $ids = is_array( $_REQUEST['id'] ) ? $_REQUEST['id'] : array( $_REQUEST['id'] );
perfecty-push-wp/admin/class-perfecty-push-admin-notifications-table.php:28: 'view' => sprintf( '<a href="?page=%s&action=%s&id=%s">%s</a>', $_REQUEST['page'], 'view', $item['id'], 'View' ),
perfecty-push-wp/admin/class-perfecty-push-admin-notifications-table.php:29: 'delete' => sprintf( '<a href="#" data-page="%s" data-action="%s" data-id="%d" data-nonce="%s">%s</a>', $_REQUEST['page'], 'delete', $item['id'], $action_nonce, 'Delete' ),

perfecty-push-wp/admin/partials/perfecty-push-admin-notifications.php:13: <input type="hidden" name="page" value="<?php echo $_REQUEST['page']; "/>
perfecty-push-wp/admin/partials/perfecty-push-admin-users.php:12: <input type="hidden" name="page" value="<?php echo $_REQUEST['page']; "/>

And it was very easy to fix:

$page = esc_html( sanitize_key( $_REQUEST['page'] ) );

For the issue in the class-perfecty-push-admin-notifications-table.php:118 line, honestly I thought it was sufficient with the intval() filtering to each of the elements:

        $ids = array_map(
            function( $item ) { 
                return intval( $item ); 
            },  
            $ids    
        );

However, I decided to do the recommended sanitization:

        $ids = array_map(
            function( $item ) {
                $item = sanitize_key( $item );
                return intval( $item );
            },
            $ids
        );

Included Unneeded Folders

This was me not knowing how the final structure of the distributable .zip file should look like. I was including some unnecessary folders and files. With their suggestions and reading the guidelines again, I just created a new shell command that copies the required files and the optimized vendor folder:

bundle() {
  CMD=$(plugin_cmd 'rm -rf vendor && composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader')
  compose_exec "$CMD"
  cp index.php vendor/
  zip -v -r perfecty-push-wp.zip admin/ assets/ includes/ languages/ lib/ public/ vendor/ composer.json composer.lock index.php LICENSE.txt perfecty-push.php README.txt uninstall.php
}

The final folder structure looks like:

Please use wp_enqueue commands

This is tied to the first issue with Chart.js. As I was including it directly, I was not using wp_enqueue. Now that I'm bundling it, it is already addressed.

And that was it! ✅

Extra

While reviewing their suggestions I noticed I didn't put the dummy index.php file in some of the folders having PHP files so I also did that.

Let's reply to the email

Once I fixed those issues I got back to them and send the link to the distributable .zip file generated from the shell:

I'm still waiting for their comments and I expect more input from them, so I'll keep you posted!

I've received feedback even before posting this and apparently now I need to address some outdated dependencies from Composer, which ultimately affects the planned minimum PHP version I was intended to support. For that I will create a new post with further details. Thanks for reading!

Photos

Cover: Photo by SpaceX on Unsplash