A new proposal to introduce phased plugin rollouts to the WordPress.org plugin directory has sparked active technical discussion on Trac. The feature, proposed by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, would allow plugin authors to gradually release updates to a subset of users before rolling them out to everyone, mirroring practices used in Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

“This isn’t a replacement for beta plugins and QA,” Mullenweg says in his ticket, “but rather a way to gather feedback from a wider range of sites and hosting environments.”

The proposal has received broad support from plugin developers and companies. David Perez, a Hostinger-sponsored Plugins Review Team rep, says it could address requests from authors for beta-code access in SVN: “With this approach, however, the final version will be more stable and reliable.”

WordPress lead developer Dion Hulse, who works for Automattic, has submitted an initial proof-of-concept patch. He has suggested limiting the rollout to auto-updates only, which he says account for the majority of plugin updates.

Ariel Klikstein, Elementor’s CTO, says phased rollouts would be especially useful for high-install plugins — like Elementor’s free website building plugin, which has 10+ million active installs.

“Right now the plugin repo has ~70 plugins with 1M+ active installations, and we think that with their wide reach they also could benefit greatly from a more controlled rollout configuration,” Klikstein says. He has proposed three rollout options: immediate (for small patches), balanced (25–50–100%), and phased (10–25–50–100%).

Andrew Ozz, also a WordPress lead developer, has given the proposal a “big +1”: “Would be great to be able to detect if something in the new release may have gone terribly wrong without breaking the sites of millions of users :)”

Syed Balkhi, CEO of Awesome Motive, has also supported the idea and suggested a rollout schedule of 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100% for major updates, with shorter cycles for smaller plugins or minor versions. “Another thing that would be helpful for plugin authors here would be more analytics in the view to see how the rollout is progressing and such – perhaps in a simple dashboard.” According to the company, over 30 million websites use Awesome Motive products, including OptinMonster, WPForms, MonsterInsights, and All in One SEO.

Technical limitations in WordPress’s update infrastructure have been a recurring concern. Hulse has outlined issues including the inability to distinguish between manual and automatic updates, a lack of effective feedback mechanisms, and challenges in segmenting sites.

“If a plugin is rolled out to 5% of users, and it’s a bug that only 10% of users run into, then that’s 0.5% of users who are both affected and updated… we’re at a tiny likelihood of issues being reported for some plugins,” he says. “I’m still fairly concerned that we don’t have any reasonable ways for authors to really know that there’s a problem.”

Several contributors have proposed enhancements to error reporting. Darren Ethier, Engineering Director at WooCommerce, has suggested routing anonymized fatal error reports to plugin authors: “This might require opt-in for sites… and would also have to account for potential false signals.”

Michael Beckwith, a support engineer at WebDevStudios, raised questions about how sites would be prioritized: “If a plugin has opted into phased releases, would sites that haven’t been actively touched in say 1 year+ be potentially first in line, leaving the available update in limbo?”

While no timeline has been set, the feature is under consideration for WordPress 6.9. A rough implementation is available in PR #498 on Trac.

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