WP Plugin Review Gate

You wrote a WordPress plugin. The code works. The thing that sends it back from the wordpress.org Plugin Review Team — or, worse, quietly stops your update from reaching the installs you already have — is almost never the code. It is eight header lines in readme.txt and the header comment at the top of the main plugin file.

This extension reads those two files the way a reviewer reads them, and says the exact line to write instead.

What it flags

Open a readme.txt or your main plugin .php file and run WP Plugin Review Gate: Check this file. Every finding carries a line number, the value it found, and the replacement line.

In readme.txt:

• Stable tag: trunk — trunk ships to every install, whatever sits in it today
• a missing Stable tag, Requires at least, Requires PHP or Tested up to
• Tested up to: 6.8.2 — the directory reads the major only, 6.8
• Tested up to older than Requires at least — two lines that contradict each other
• a short description over 150 characters, which the directory cuts mid-word
• more than five tags, where only the first five are used
• missing License / License URI, missing == Changelog ==
• a first line that is not === Your Plugin Name ===

In the main plugin file:

• a header comment with no Version, Requires PHP, License or Text Domain
• no defined( 'ABSPATH' ) || exit; guard
• wp_enqueue_script() / wp_enqueue_style() pointing at a remote URL instead of a file you ship
• eval(), base64_decode(), gzinflate(), str_rot13() — what a reviewer reads as obfuscated code
• a hard-coded wp-content/plugins path instead of plugin_dir_path()

21 rules in all. On the sample readme.txt shipped in _fixtures/dirty.txt it returns 6 findings; on _fixtures/clean.txt, none.

Why a chatbot answer is not the same thing

Ask an assistant to write a readme.txt and you get a plausible one: the header block is there, the fields are spelled right. What it cannot know is the state of your file — that your Stable tag says trunk because you pushed in a hurry, that Tested up to picked up a patch number, that your short description grew to 179 characters after the last rewrite. This runs on the file in front of you and counts.

Free and paid

Free, no key: the file you have open is checked in full, every rule, every line number.

Paid: the whole plugin folder in one pass — readme.txt read against the plugin header, Stable tag against Version across files — plus a dated report you keep for the submission. $29 once, one licence key per person or team seat, 7-day full refund: https://buy.polar.sh/polar_cl_qArF3mNB1PwK3Pdmu8u0XW9Y9cxzGW2ytS3iq05dr5h

A freelance WordPress developer bills $30 to $90 an hour; a pre-submission read is an hour or two.

The same engine in the browser

https://getreadystack.com/tools/wp-plugin-review-gate runs the identical engine.js on text you paste, with nothing uploaded.

Nothing here contacts wordpress.org, and no file leaves your machine. The licence check is the only network call the extension makes, and only for the paid sweep.