u/Hugo_SecureHoldWP

I’ve been thinking about production logging in WordPress plugins lately.

During development it’s tempting to log everything because more context makes debugging easier. In production though, that gets uncomfortable pretty quickly.

Things like request payloads, webhook bodies, order IDs, user IDs, API responses and stack traces can be extremely useful when something fails, but they can also create privacy, storage and retention problems if you keep too much.

I’m curious where other plugin developers draw the line.

For example, do you:

- log full external API responses or only selected fields?
- keep business identifiers like order IDs in logs?
- redact emails, names and payment-related data by default?
- use different retention periods for debug logs vs audit/history data?
- let merchants enable verbose logging temporarily?
- automatically delete old logs?

I’m especially interested in plugins where failures may only become visible hours or days later, so having enough context to reconstruct what happened actually matters.

What has worked well for you in production without turning the log table into a second database?

I’ve been thinking more about plugin lifecycle lately, especially what should happen when a user removes a plugin completely.

Deactivation is easy enough, but uninstall is where things get less obvious.

For example:

- plugin options

- custom database tables

- scheduled cron jobs

- logs

- generated files

- cached data

- user-generated or business data created through the plugin

Some of that clearly feels disposable.

Some of it really doesn’t.

I’m curious how other plugin developers draw the line.

Do you delete everything by default, preserve business data, or give the user an explicit cleanup option?

And have you ever seen an uninstall mistake that caused real problems later?

I’ve been spending more time lately testing WooCommerce payment flows beyond the normal “payment succeeded” case, and I’m curious how other developers approach this.

The obvious happy path is easy. The interesting problems seem to be everything around it:

- payment succeeds but WordPress times out before the order is fully updated

- webhook arrives twice

- webhook arrives before or after the expected local state

- customer closes the page immediately after payment

- external API succeeds but the local database update fails

- retry accidentally creates a duplicate action

I’m starting to think the recovery path matters almost as much as the normal payment flow.

For people building WooCommerce payment integrations, what are the edge cases you consider essential before calling something production-ready?

Any particularly painful ones you only discovered after going live?