Considerations and Concerns for Platform Plugin Development

One of the major strengths of WordPress is the ability to develop small plugins to solve particular needs. Whether you want to re-arrange menus or add a new dashboard widget, WordPress gives you the tools to make small, focused plugins to customize nearly anything.

This paradigm changes when your code is running across tens of thousands of customer sites. Suddenly, you have to coordinate which features are active based on the site. Is this a WooCommerce site? Does this feature exist in this version of WordPress? Has the site owner already installed another plugin to handle this piece of functionality?

In this session, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the architecture, development decisions, and release process behind the “Must-Use” (MU) plugin that runs on every WordPress site across the Nexcess Managed Applications platform. Attendees will learn about the practice and challenges of building a WordPress plugin at scale, as well as how to better handle conflicts in their plugins of any size.

What You’ll Learn

• Plugin architecture
• What works and what does not work
• Lessons that can be applied to plugins of any size
• And more!