 This is going to be a little bit of an informal session. All right, so I'll tell you a little bit about myself, kind of open you up to hopefully give you an idea of what kind of questions you can ask. First of all, it's literally ask anything you want, hopefully related to plugins, but you can ask me other things if you want to. So my name is Pippin Williamson. I'm a plugin developer. I live in Hutchinson, Kansas, and I've been building plugins for about eight years now, I think. I started building plugins my sophomore year in college, which is at the University of Kansas, and I built them just kind of for fun. I was doing some client sites at the time, and I was building special features for clients, and then eventually decided, you know, this could be kind of fun as a plugin, and there's this cool website called CodeCanyon.net run by a company called Envato. Let's throw it up and see what happens, and it was my very first plugin I ever released. It was a little plugin called Font Uploader, and it allowed you to upload a font file to a website, and then apply it to an element on the site. And this was before we had really, now there's much, much better options, but anyway, I put it up there, I put a little price tag on it, and on my first day I sold a copy of it, and I went out and bought a cup of coffee, and I was hooked. And I was like, awesome. So I managed to sell enough to buy a few cups of coffee every month, and as a broke college student, I cannot tell you how awesome that was. I mean, three bucks for a lot day on your way to class is like the best thing in the world in the morning. So anyway, that was about eight years ago, and I write plugins. It's my full-time job now, and it has been that way for five or six years now. And I do a few things with plugins. So first of all, I run a website called Pippinsplugins.com and this has been kind of my personal portfolio website for a long time. It's a personal blog. I write about plugin development there a lot. I used to be very active in producing tutorials for plugin developers that wanted to learn how to build plugins. And I mentioned development a couple of times. If you're not a developer, that's totally fine. I want any kind of questions you have, whether it's using plugins, what should you use, what should you not use, how do I build a plugin, how do I sell a plugin, anything that you have. So if you hear me talk about dev or code a couple of times, don't worry, don't run away, it's okay. It's just what I like to do. So sometimes it comes out. Anyway, so I run a little website called Pippinsplugins.com and it's been my personal site for a while and eventually that led me into building a whole slew of different plugins that have been released and eventually led to a much larger project called Easy Digital Downloads, which is an e-commerce plugin for WordPress. Eventually, I started to get to a point where I wanted to sell plugins through my own website and through my own systems, take control of the payment process of the licensing of how I gave the plugin to the customer, how I communicated with them, etc. And so I ended up building this plugin and that turned into my full-time job pretty quickly, was building that plugin. And that also led into building another plugin called Affiliate WP, which is an Affiliate Marketing plugin for WordPress that connects to an e-commerce system, whether it's Digital Downloads or WooCommerce or any of the other e-commerce platforms or membership systems out there for WordPress. And then I also built a plugin called Restrict Content Pro for selling memberships to your website, and it's actually one of my oldest plugins out there. In total, I don't know how many plugins I've built. I've built a lot of them. You can find a lot of them there at a link on the bottom, profiles.wordpress.org. My username is Morbach. It's a silly name that I've had since I was six, I think, that I came up. I used to want to be a fantasy writer and I created a character and that was the bad guy. And I don't know why I picked that name for myself, but I did. So anyway, that's my name around the WordPress world. And anyway, I also do review plugins for WordPress.org, so people that submit plugins there to the plugin repository. I'm one of the people that review the submissions there and either approve or deny it or help you get it submitted and get it listed on the repository there. So we see a lot of plugins come through. There's about 50 to 100 plugins submitted every single day to wordpress.org. And there's two of us that go through them. And for every plugin that I review, Mika Epsinu does 500 of them. So she's the real badass for sure. Anyway, so I propose a session to Devin who's sitting over here as one of the organizers. It's just kind of a thing. Anything you want, anything you want to ask about plugins, it can be development, it can be selling, it can be using plugins, it can be anything. If you don't know what a plugin is, that's okay too. I think people have a lot of questions about plugins and sometimes it's not very clear on where to get your answers. I've been in the plugin space for a while now, so ask me anything. Okay, so the question is what's the best plugin for A.B. testing in WordPress? Well, there's a few different options. There is a developer sitting in the room, his name is Josh Pollock. He is building a plugin right now specifically for that purpose. Inget I believe is the name. So that's one to go check out. There used to be one called OptimizePress, I think. No, that's the wrong name. That's a totally different plugin. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of it, but it's been around for a while and it was pretty good. Another thing that you can do, one of the things with plugins, people sometimes want to use a plugin for everything and sometimes that's not always the answer. Sometimes also, there's a service that you can use that can work for you as well. I personally use something called Optimizely.com which is a really good A.B. testing service. Sure. Okay, so what was the, for me, what was the course from going from being a Broke College student to being a profitable company? So now I run a company that, my company is called Sandhills Development and basically these four websites, Pivensplugins.com, EasyDigitalDownloads.com, FLAWP and Restrict Content Pro are our websites and our products and we are now, last year we did 1.3 million, I think, in revenue and we're profitable. We have a team of, we're now seven full-time employees and X number of contractors depending on the day. Tomorrow there's seven, yesterday there's three, I don't know, it varies. But anyway, so it's done very well for us. In terms of A to B, A to Z, I guess it's much more A to Z than A to B, but it was a lot of starting out when I first wrote the first plugins that I built and I put them up. The very first plugin I ever wrote was a commercial plugin. I put it on a website called CodeCanyon.net, which most people are probably familiar with ThemeForce.net CodeCanyon was kind of the plugin version of that. The very first plugin I ever built was on that website and it sold for $8. It was not, it was not a money maker, it was a sold two or three copies a month and at the time like I said I was a broke college student, it paid for a cup of coffee or two. But what happened was it was, it kind of triggered something in me that said I think I can keep, I can do more of this. Like okay, this little plugin makes $20 a month. Well what if we do a second one? Or what if we do a third one? What if we do four of them? And we build them up and we build them up and build them up. So I built another plugin. I built a slider plugin. How many people have used a slider? How many people really love the slider? So I actually built one of the very first slider plugins for WordPress and it was called Sugar Slider at the time. Thankfully the plugin is not available anymore. I still have a copy of it on my computer but it's not sold anymore. But for me the transition was going from I built a little plugin as a hobby. It was fun, I had a good time building it and I built another one and it just kind of cascaded from there, kept building them and I actually had a turning point at one point in college. I was engaged to my soon to be wife and it was my summer between my junior and senior year college and I was still broke and I said I've got a summer I've got three months before I go back to school and then I'm getting married and I don't know what I'm doing. So I had to figure it out and so I said I'm going to test it. If I can survive and I can pay my bills with plugin development and WordPress development for the summer I think I can make it work and that was my experiment. And so I worked my ass off that summer. I built a lot of different plugins. I put things up on Codecany and I started working on building things on my own site and it paid for itself. I did it. I managed to pay the bills that summer. I don't even, I don't know if I had a dollar left over in the bank, whatever it wasn't very much. And it just kind of kept going. I found something that I really, really, really liked and so I kind of went after it and then I found where I had something that I needed and so I went after that and then I found another thing that I needed because there wasn't something out there that fit my purpose or fit my needs and so I went after that and that's where these three products, ease of digital downloads, affiliate content pro came from is filling that need for myself. I needed those features and so I went after that. Is it repeatable? I think so. Absolutely. I think it's different for everybody but I don't know if that really answers your question or not but I hope it helps in a way. Okay, so the question is what's the onboarding process for contractors? What onboarding process? All right, so onboarding, how do you bring a new contractor into existing projects, especially projects that have been around for a year, two years, three years, etc. and get them into the flow? How do you familiarize them with the systems? How do you say, well, these are the way that we do things, whether it's from your development to your support to your planning. We don't have one. We just kind of say here's everything and go? That's not a good answer. We're learning. So yeah, I think that's the reality that most people you know, I think we're very common. It's very common for us to look at other teams and to look at people that are doing really great things and saying, man, they are kicking ass. They've got some great things and then you look at yourself and you realize and you think, what have we done wrong? What are we doing? Why don't we have this documented? Why don't, when I bring a new contractor in, why are they not going at full speed tomorrow, everybody has the same problems. It's super common. Questions, what are the most common mistakes seen when uploading plugins to WordPress.org? There's a few of them. So it used to be including your own versions of jQuery, which is for anybody that's not familiar, is a library that lets you manipulate pages, do things on the web page, etc. And there was a problem in WordPress for a long time where developers would include their own versions of it and it would break things all over the place. That's still reasonably common, but we've mostly squashed that out pretty well. Now the biggest problem is people not following directions. They submit it without any code. They just submit a plugin, they give it a name, and then don't give us the plugin to actually review. And so then we have to give them an email that says, we actually have to look at your plugin before we can improve it. It's pretty common. The second one is not what caused someone to not be approved initially, but let's say they have some problem. It doesn't matter what it is. And so we send them an email and they just never answer. There's probably thousands of plugins every year that sit there forever never approved because you didn't answer the one email when we said, why are you doing this or we need you to do this slightly differently. Another pretty common one is security issues. We see a lot of just really, really bad code submitted and that's okay because everybody starts somewhere. There's nothing rough. When we're reviewing plugins on workers.org, we don't judge you on your code. As long as there's not blatant problems with it I don't care if it's written well. I don't care if it has bugs. I don't care if it's pretty. I mean a little bit I care because it hurts me inside when I see really bad things but the thing is that everybody starts somewhere and we're not there to judge. We're there to say okay is this safe for users to use? Okay that's fine. We'll approve it. So security issues are definitely pretty common. Especially people that are interacting with the database. Probably one of the biggest ones right now is we have a rule that says you cannot load assets off of other websites. So you can't load things from Google CDNs. You can't load from whatever service you want unless there's a very good reason for doing that. And that actually comes down to a security thing. Is it anything that's off site? Anything that's hosted on other servers? There's no way for us to know if that's malicious and so we don't allow it. So the question is how do you stay competitive in space? So how do you come up with something that is unique? How do you be competitive? How do you do something that hasn't been done already? I'll tell you that I'm standing here and I've never written a single thing that's original. I don't know if that's really a great answer or not but I don't think you have to be original. I think you just need to do something better. So if there's somebody that's built something out there, whatever system it is and you look at that and you think you can build it better, go for it. There's no such thing as a unique idea. Everything's been done in some form or other. It's just the way that you implement it. The implementation is key. Question is how do you manage time and projects? I don't use a time tracker. I don't know if that's good or bad but I don't really have a good answer for that honestly. So I've tried to, one of my goals throughout the last eight years has been to build things that I want to build. And I recognize that this is a little bit of a luxury that we've managed to get to a point where we can kind of build what we want to build in. Now I say that saying eight hours of every day are still doing things that I don't want to do. I'll be honest, out of every single ticket that I answer in the day or every single bug that I fix during the day, I don't want to do that. They're related to the bigger project of what I want to build but they're not things I want to do. But I still try to focus on everything being we have a goal in mind, whether it's the completion of a particular project or just moving one project a little bit forward. And I try to make sure that those are in our focus every day. And whether it's an hour or two hours I think maybe the thing that's helped me the most in trying to better manage time and stay focused is get rid of distractions. I'll have two little examples for you. One, I originally wrote plugin after plugin after plugin after plugin. I had about 100 plugins on WordPress.org at one point. I think I'm down to 70 now. But anyway, they became distractions. So even if each little plugin only took 30 minutes a month to maintain, when you have 100 of those times 30, that's a lot of time every single month. And so I started saying, okay, I'm going to cut this one out. I'm going to get rid of that one. And then the next thing is getting rid of distractions in my personal life. I will happily wear the same t-shirt every single day. Hopefully it's different versions of the same t-shirt, but getting up in the morning and picking a t-shirt to wear, it's not a problem that I want to address. Give me 15 black t-shirts and I'm happy every day. My wife gets mad at me when I don't come home. That's a challenge. Super hard. I love what I do. My job is my hobby as well. And so it's very easy for me to spend 15 hours building something. It's self-discipline, honestly. Well, it's a couple things. Number one, you spend three years doing what you love as your hobby and as your job. And eventually you start to not love your hobby anymore. And so you find a new hobby. For me, I really like making beer. And so I go home in the evening and I say I'm done at this time. I'm going to go spend three hours doing something else, whether it's on my bike or making beer in my basement or whatever it is. I think it's definitely been very important for me to try and find a separation between my work and my hobby. I love my work, but my work is no longer my hobby. Why did I kill it? Okay, so he used my old slider plugin, which was called Sugar Slider. I killed it, I think, three years ago. I killed it for a couple of reasons. Number one, from the development perspective, it wasn't built very well. I built it at the time that I was definitely still learning development. I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew enough to be dangerous. And it had a couple of bugs. So one big example, anybody here who has worked on client sites and has had a client say, I want 70 images in that slider. It's a pretty common thing. I don't know why people do it, but they do it. Well, there was an issue in Sugar Slider where if you put 70 images in it, it just doesn't work. 100% doesn't work. And it was one of those issues that it was rare enough that I just, whenever it happened, I'm like, look, I'm really sorry you paid 15 bucks, but maybe go ask for a refund because it won't work for that. And eventually I got tired of doing that and not fixing it. And I knew that fixing it was a much bigger problem because it was, the bug that caused that to happen was a design flaw. There was no, oh, it's a five line or an hour to fix it. It was a fundamental problem with the way that I built it. And there were numerous other problems as well, but that was the big one where I was like, you know what, I don't think it is worth it for me to rebuild this plugin in a way that works when there's a lot of other better options out there. This is not what I really care about. This is not where, this is not a product that I want to focus on. And so I'm going to discontinue it as opposed to forcing myself, sitting down and torturing myself to go through and fix it and make it work as a way it's advertised. Okay, so the question was, first of all, we had a critical vulnerability a couple of years ago. Now, was this the one from a week ago? Okay, so we had a really bad bug a week ago in a plugin that I built. Super bad, actually, to the degree of let's say that you are running a subscription service and you do $5,000 a month. And then when you install this update, we discovered that subscriptions were tied to wrong customers and we had to go through and fix them and we might cancel every single subscription that you have on your website. Not very good. Not a good bug to have. It was kind of scary. Anyway, we fixed it, we tracked it all down, but the question is, what's a way to prevent that kind of thing from happening? Is there any kind of automated tool that we can use to detect those before we discover it because a customer reports it? There are a variety of tools. I don't personally use them and maybe that's why the bug happened. I actually don't have a recommendation for you on that, aside from higher code reviews. Get an external code review, whether it's from a developer you trust, a friend, someone else. A few months or a year ago, we hired a developer and we paid him quite a bit to come in and just review a code base for easy digital downloads. He spent a week or two going through and the number of issues that he found was shocking and it's because he's looking at it with fresh eyes. We look at this code base every single day and it doesn't matter how good of a developer you are. If you look at the same thing every single day, week after week, month after month, you're going to be blind to problems. There are some problems you will never see bring somebody in with fresh eyes. I think that's hugely important for preventing some of those problems. Don't be afraid to pay really good money to do it too. My personal website, pipinsplugins.com was built for that reason because when I was learning plugins, I did not feel that there was a resource to learn plugins. There was a lot of theme development tutorials out there, there was a lot of generic WordPress, but there was nothing plugin specific. That was what it was built for. I'm not very active on posting tutorials to it now. There is a pretty good archive of resources there. There is a plugin development 101 series there that's available. It is. It's still current. There are a couple others. Tom McFarland who I think is somewhere around here in front of me. Excellent. GoBriga's blog does a lot of excellent stuff. Search how to write a plugin. It's actually a pretty good Google search that does come up with some pretty good results. The biggest thing is I wrote my first plugin and I had no idea how to write a plugin. What I discovered, I built this feature for a client. It was this feature to upload fonts to the website. I thought it was a cool feature. I had no idea how to turn it into a plugin, but somebody asked me to. My response was, I don't know how to do that. That's scary. I finally said, okay, screw it. I'm going to go research it. I'm going to figure out how to do it. I discovered it took three lines of not even code. It was just a common in a file that turned my code that I had already into a plugin. It was so simple it was it made me really mad because I had spent months building this. I'm like, I have no idea how to build a plugin. I don't want to touch it. Then I discovered it took 30 seconds. I was done. If you know how to code, you can write a plugin. Guarantee it. Yes and no. There's a lot of plugins out there that are unfortunately not very well built. There's 40,000, 50,000 plugins on WordPress.org. With that number, you will always have some that are bad. Some that are good. Some that are great. Some that are somewhere in between. Unfortunately, just as a general rule, we can't auto update everything. We cannot trust 10,000 developers worldwide to always push good code. There's also a lot of times when even great developers push big updates that they don't necessarily cause problems, but they change things. Change doesn't always go over well with clients. I think one of my favorite tickets that we ever got was Urgent. This is a catastrophe. How dare you? You've broken everything. The only thing that we change from one version to the next version is one button move like three pixels. This was a catastrophe. It's e-commerce. People are picky. I don't think we can auto update everything. I think there's a lot of things that we can auto update, especially when it comes to security vulnerabilities. One of the beauties of the WordPress ecosystem that we have and the platform that we work on is the ability to identify a security flaw and push it out to 30 million websites in 10 minutes. There's no other system that can do that right now. That's pretty cool. We had a security vulnerability six months ago that affected easy digital downloads and a bunch of other plugins. It was a pretty widespread vulnerability that somebody discovered. We got together, we fixed it, and then we auto deployed those updates and we had 50 to 500,000 websites fixed. That vulnerability dawned, obliterated from the Internet in five minutes. That's right there is a perfect example where auto updates are wonderful. That's what we want them for. But as for like new features or other things like that, it's pretty hard to justify doing it. Knowing that there's so much custom code out there, it's not a controlled environment. In order to push out major changes, you have to have a controlled environment. What's the one thing that I would like to build that I haven't built yet? I want to build a hosted e-commerce system. I think it would be really fun. It's not something that we we've got some plans for it, but it's not that far along yet. There's some cool things that you could do with a hosted system. Let's say you have 100,000 customers on it or 4,000 customers or whatever. E-commerce, one of the things that's really important is figuring out how do you optimize that purchase process. Look at something like Amazon. They can do an A-B test where they give one version of a purchase button to one set of customers and another version to another customer and they can, in a matter of days, maybe minutes or hours, they can figure out which one is better. They can say if that button is green it makes an average of one cent more per customer, which is $50 million a year because we're Amazon and it's crazy. When you are on a controlled environment where you control the entire flow of everything, you don't have people coming in and building custom themes or modifying the checkout process or anything like that, you can do really cool stuff. One of the things that I want to do is build a hosted system where hopefully we get to a point where we have a large number of customers and then we can start doing those kind of experiments and say we've discovered that through our testing that a skinny checkout form is 10 times better than a wide one that has the exact same fields or that if there is a link in the menu bar, that loses 0.5% of customers because they get distracted. Those kinds of tests when you control the entire process for 50,000 websites, 10,000 websites, whatever number, there's some really cool data that you can figure out. That's what I'd like to build. So the question is on renewal rates. So what is our renewal rate right now and how are we improving it because it sucks? It is basically the question. Alright, so renewal rates, we sell a lot of plugins and we sell them with a yearly license and so you purchase it today. That license key expires a year from today and we hope that you will come back to renew it in order to we encourage people to renew by limiting support and updates and things like that to people that have an active license key. It's a pretty common sale system that most people who have purchased a premium plugin are familiar with. To be honest renewal rates for manual renewals and manual renewal being I send you an email, you click it, you go through the purchase process, you renew it is terrible. It is awful. We're talking 10% renewal rate, maybe 20% if you've got a pretty good renewal rate. It's really, really not good. So that means that 80% of your customers are never coming back even if they are still using the system. People don't renew for a huge number of reasons either because they didn't see the email it went to spam, they clicked it and they clicked it from their phone and they're like well check out process for my phone is hard I'm gonna do it by desktop and then I forget. Who knows, tons of reasons people don't renew. Even people that are still using software for years to come. So it's a problem and for us as a business in what we have a lot of expenses this is something that we have to address. It's one of, honestly it is more important for us to address renewals and getting those customers back than it is to get new customers by far. I mean if we think of look at whatever revenue is last year and then say well you lost 80% of that. We just threw it in the trash can for the next year. It's a little tough to stomach and so we've decided to get a little bit more aggressive with it and we've actually recently converted all of our systems to use an automatic renewal system that you can opt out of at any time. So let's say you purchase it and you're going to purchase it you want to use it for a year and you don't want to use it after that you can cancel at any time. There is no obligation like that but it solves a problem of people not knowing they need to renew even though if they knew about it. The number of people that don't see an email when you send it to them is astounding or the number of people that don't recognize what they're seeing or what they're doing is crazy. So we've recently actually changed our systems to be automatic renewals and it's going to be a pretty significant impact for next year. So just to give you a quick example let's say that our renewal rate is 20% this year. Alternatively with automatic renewals you're going to see 75% to 80% renewal rate. So our renewal rate will increase by 60% probably minimum. Take a dollar in a amount and now do the math and for anybody who sells a product it's the way to go. There is no doubt. There's a reason that every single company that does exceptionally well in software is a SAS. I hope that kind of answered your question. Most of the time I don't think charging a monthly works. It kind of depends on the service or the product that you're selling. If you are selling a, let's say that you're a service, let's say that you're MailChimp a monthly bill to MailChimp makes sense because guess what? If you don't pay it next month you don't get to use the service. End of story. Like it makes sense. So a monthly bill is fine for that. But now let's say that you sell a plugin and you bill monthly. What happens on month number two if you don't pay? Okay, well if you completely kill the plugin so it doesn't work anymore that's one thing. But let's just say that it just, it still works as is. Why am I going to come back to you and pay you a second month? I might because I hope to be a decent person. But what if I forget about it? So as a store owner the problem that you're going to see with monthly is customers like, you know what? I'll commit to five bucks a month. I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to $50 a year. So I'll do a month. I'll pay you five months. I mean I'll pay you $5 and next month I forget about it. And I'm a $5 customer instead of a $50 customer. But I receive the same product at the end. So typically, especially for products, monthly doesn't work. So for developers how do you choose when and where to put a hook in a plugin and how do you decide when you realize that you screwed up and you need to take that hook back out? Okay, first of all I like to go with the idea of try to be as flexible as possible. And if you have a function that returns a value it goes through a filter. If you have something that performs an action it fires an action. Before it happens, during it and after. And I think with that basic guideline that tells you everywhere that you need to put a hook from day one. Then when you discover that you're silly or dumb or maybe a little bit tipsy at the time and you typed an action wrong and you have a typo in your code and it's been there for three years and you realize that you have a lot of people that have written off on that code and they just never told you that you typed it wrong even though it's blatantly obvious how do you get rid of it? The answer is you don't. You don't get rid of it. Welcome to the backwards compatibility. There are ways to do it but it's pretty hard. Here we go. Yes, five minutes? Okay, thank you. Okay, so if you have multiple plugins that do the same thing, how do you pick the better one? Personal choice. Personal choice experience. Which one has better support? Which one is updated more frequently? Just in general, which do you have a better experience with? Sometimes there is not a right or wrong answer. So I started building plugins myself. How did I get other people involved into the projects? How did I hire new developers that were interested in and they were good developers? First of all, I think just having a going about product development in an open way and an open source spirit in some way is going to encourage a certain number of people. You're going to get people that use a product and they find a problem with it so they come and say, hey, I would like to I think you should improve this. I'll get you a few like this maybe. Ask people. I think the most successful thing we did with easy digital downloads and getting community involvement was I wrote a blog post that says I'm building a product. Here it is. It's open source. It's on GitHub. Help me. And it worked. It seems kind of silly but ask people to help. And then those people that help, a lot of people will volunteer and be they'll prove their worth. And then those are the people that you hire. Those are the people that you say would you like to do a little bit more? Best plugin or combination plugins for security? The one that I would go for would be I theme security. I theme security. So it's by the company called I themes and then it's security. It used to be a plugin called better WP security. I think that's right. And then it was acquired by I themes in the last year or so. I theme security. Don't combine security plugins. It's typically a bad practice just because they do a lot of the same thing. And it may not be apparent that they do the same thing and they might clash or they just cause performance problems on your site. So why I theme security and not something like WordFence? My answer is really that it's what I have a good experience with. And it varies for everybody. People are going to have great experiences with WordFence or with Protect in Jetpack or whatever the particular security issue that you want to address is honestly, I don't use any of them to be frank. I've never put a single one on any of my sites and I'm okay. I'm still here. Business is still alive. And it's because frankly WordFence is pretty secure as it is. The biggest problem in WordFence are developers. Are people writing other plugins to solve, to do various things and then that introducing a security bug. Who's thrown a Panama papers recently? That was not WordPress. That was a plugin that ran on WordPress. And it's okay. This is not a criticism of plugins. This is definitely not me telling you not to use plugins. It's simply that WordPress itself is inherently secure. Depending on the situation you may want to do more but it's not mandatory. One more question. Most of the time, zero. So how dangerous is it to upload a plugin to WordPress that has not been tested with that version? So let's say that WordPress 4.5 which just came out and then you have a plugin that you want to use that says test it up to WordPress 4.4. Is it dangerous to upload that plugin? The vast majority of the time the answer is absolutely not. The reason being that most plugins are not updated for compatibility like tested because they don't need to be. Alright, I have 75 ish plugins on WordPress.org. Rough guess how many do you think actually say they're compatible with WordPress 4.5? About two. The reason being is those are the only two that actually received updates in that time because those are the only two that needed updates. And most of the time those are not because they needed an update for WordPress 4.5. It's because I fixed a different bug or fixed a compatibility issue. The tested up to thing on a plugin is actually defined inside of a plugin file and in order to change that number the developer has to go in make a change in the plugin file and send it up to WordPress.org. It's a hassle. Every time a major version of WordPress comes out I get an email that says, here's all of your plugins by the way that are not tested WordPress 4.5. You should go update them. And I look at it and I'm like... So honestly the answer is not. Very, very, very rarely is it a problem. The only time that it becomes an issue is if you have a plugin that is using a major feature in WordPress that changes between those two versions. Example might be post formats. Post formats changed pretty drastically between a couple of versions not that terribly long ago. So if you had a plugin that was doing something with post formats it might have been a problem between those two versions. Or if you have a plugin that a really old feature is the links manager in WordPress I suspect that not everybody here knows what that feature is because it's been gone for a while but if you had a plugin that interacted with that feature and then you up and let's say that somebody updated from, I don't even know what version that was 3738 and you went from 3738 that feature is gone. Completely. That's a problem for you. But that's pretty uncommon. Okay, I think that's all the time that I got. Let's get a round of applause guys. Thank you so much.