In a recent meeting with the Plugin Review Team, it became evident that there are gaps in our communication between the Plugin Review Team and the Meta Team, particularly concerning the addition of new features to the Plugin Directory.
While tracking existing Meta tickets is possible, the team generally isn’t informed in advance before new commits are added.
This can lead to problematic situations. We indirectly represent the directory — even if our focus is primarily on the review process — and people contact us with questions, relying on us to assist with such matters. It would be helpful for the Plugin Review team to have the opportunity to review, test, provide feedback, and (when appropriate) communicate this to plugin authors.
To improve this situation, we’d love help from the Meta team. Would the Meta team be able to adapt some workflows to facilitate better communication between our teams?
An example was the WordPress Playground preview ticket, which had to be reverted. I’m confident the situation would not have escalated as it did if a better process had been in place.
Some examples of things that could be done:
- Send a notification on the #pluginreview Slack channel or on our P2 a few hours before implementing changes (ideally at least 24 hours for major changes).
- If someone has the bandwidth to build a complete feedback process, we could create something to add a delay for new feature commits for a set period or maybe test beta versions of changes on a staging site.