Publishing WordPress Plugin : Step by Step Guide

Publishing WordPress Plugin can be a big obstructive factor for an average Plugin developer as it involves the knowledge needed to upload it through SVN. The process of Publishing WordPress Plugin is quite complicated if the developer is not sure what is SVN or have never used Git. But, with good easy to use Softwares with a Graphical Interface, Publishing WordPress Plugin has been quite easy.

Steps Needed Before Publishing WordPress Plugin

Developing a WordPress Plugin is fully separate topic. So we are not going through it. There are lot of peoples who writes PHP codes and publishes in proper places, if these programmers are helped a bit, the integration with WordPress will make it a plugin. In brief, you have develop a bug free plugin, submit it to WordPress.org and request for hosting it. This hosting involves the painful (to most) SVN story – that is the way for Publishing WordPress Plugin.

Steps for Publishing WordPress Plugin

After doing the above preliminary steps for getting the access for Publishing WordPress Plugin, you will receive an email from WordPress, it might go to Spam / Junk folder, so be aware. In this email, you will get the required URL for Publishing WordPress Plugin through SVN. This is important, if your plugin’s name is my-own-plugin, then the path will be :

You can read about SVN from here before going to the steps for Publishing WordPress Plugin.

Steps to do before Publishing WordPress Plugin

TortoiseSVN is a easy to use Windows Software. Download and install TortoiseSVN for publishing WordPress Plugin. Now we need to make our own computer’s repository rightly arranged, so that in case of Operating System failure it will not hurt the original source. Create a folder named Plugin Development (or similar, its for your easy management) in the root of a hard disk partition other than where Windows is installed. Mac and users should follow the same rule. Under this folder, create exactly the plugin named folder (or move the plugin folder itself) under this folder, so that the setup looks like this :

my-own-plugin does not exist, its a fake example for this Publishing WordPress Plugin guide. TortoiseSVN will get incorporated in to your right click menu making publishing WordPress Plugin easy and right click menu looking bad. If you right click on the folder :

Clicking the SVN Checkout option will popup a Window which will ask for details :

It will just sync the folders of WordPress with yours one, that is why it will not ask for password. You can check the truth by visiting to :

It will show :

And it will create appropriate folders making the first step for Publishing WordPress Plugin :

Before Publishing WordPress Plugin of yours for the first time, I will recommend to pull some standard plugin in this way, the url will be like  http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/name-of-plugin/ ; examine how they have created the structures.

Simply (i) Right clicking and selecting add TortoiseSVN > Add (nothing will happen apparently!), then again (ii) Right clicking SVN commit will do the Publishing WordPress Plugin step, after you have done the below steps.

Before Publishing WordPress Plugin, here is a quick check :

• Do not do anything with the .svn folder
• branches should be empty
• In the trunk folder, there should be the screenshots for the wordpress plugin, the readme.txt file, the plugins contents, in other words  content of your my-own-plugin folder like  my-own-plugin.php ,  my-own-plugin-functions.php, css folder etc will be there.
• If you create an assets folder where branches, tags etc folders are and put an 772 pixels x 250 pixels image, it will show as banner (See documentation in WordPress).
• tags folder need not to be done anything with. It is automated process for the sub versions.

Some usages trunk folder’s subfolder to put the full contents, its actually not using the full power of SVN. That is equivalent to simple git commit. SVN automatically creates them.

We have came to the end of Publishing WordPress Plugin guide. You can do serious mistake at first attempts, make new updated version like 1.1 (create folder under ).