[DISCUSSION] First plugin went live on WordPress.org this week. Stuff that caught me out.
Got my first plugin through the .org review and live this week. Been chipping at it on and off for a couple of years, life kept getting in the way, finally shoved it over the line. A bunch of it tripped me up in ways I couldn't find a straight answer on beforehand, so I'm dumping it here.
Screenshots first, because they nearly broke me. You upload new ones, the listing still shows the old. You reupload. Still old. You start doubting your whole setup. It's not you. Full images and thumbnails cache separately, so the thumbnail lags behind the big version. Click an old thumb and the new image is usually already sitting under it. Give it a day and it sorts itself. I did not give it a day.
Run Plugin Check before you submit, not after they bounce you. Official plugin, runs most of what the reviewers run. For me it was output escaping over and over, stuff my editor never once moaned about. Would've saved me a whole rejection round.
It's still SVN. In 2026. And your banner, icon and screenshots don't go in the plugin zip, they sit in a separate assets folder in SVN. So your listing images and your code are two different things in two different places. Took me embarrassingly long to work that out.
The readme is not throwaway. It's your listing copy, it gets indexed, and the AI answer boxes seem to pull straight from it. Write it like it matters, it's doing more than your homepage early on.
And a person reviews it, not a bot. Reads the code, comes back with line numbers. Few days each round. Fair enough, just submit earlier than you'd like.
One plugin in so take it with salt. What got the rest of you?