WordPress has something new for the plugin directory: the Featured Plugins Experiment. Anyone who has shipped to the repo lately knows the chicken and egg problem. You build a solid tool, and because it has zero installs it stays buried on page 20 of the search results. The initiative, pitched directly to Matt Mullenweg, is meant to surface newer plugins that have not reached the big leagues yet.
I have watched plenty of experiments come and go in this ecosystem. This one reads differently because the bar is technical rather than popular. A plugin qualifies if it has fewer than 10,000 active installs and has been listed for less than a year. Eight get featured every two weeks, assuming they clear the quality bar.
The technical bar for selection
The part of the Featured Plugins Experiment that interests me as a dev is not the visibility, it is the criteria. Cool ideas will not carry a submission. They want code that follows the WordPress Coding Standards, which means code a human can read, nonces used properly and input that gets sanitized every time.
Security is where most plugins fall down, usually because it was left until the end. Reading $_POST directly with no verification will get you passed over. I have refactored dozens of legacy plugins where the previous dev shipped without a single wp_verify_nonce anywhere in the file. That will not fly here.
The right way to handle input
Here is the naive version next to what the experiment expects for basic security and implementation. If you already work the way I described in modern plugin development, none of this will be new.
<?php
/**
* Naive Approach (Will be rejected)
*/
function bbioon_save_settings_naive() {
if ( isset( $_POST['my_option'] ) ) {
update_option( 'my_option', $_POST['my_option'] );
}
}
/**
* Technical Standard Approach (The Featured Bar)
*/
function bbioon_save_settings_standard() {
// 1. Check permissions
if ( ! current_user_can( 'manage_options' ) ) {
return;
}
// 2. Verify Nonce
if ( ! isset( $_POST['bbioon_nonce'] ) || ! wp_verify_nonce( $_POST['bbioon_nonce'], 'bbioon_save_action' ) ) {
wp_die( 'Security check failed' );
}
// 3. Sanitize and Save
if ( isset( $_POST['my_option'] ) ) {
$clean_data = sanitize_text_field( $_POST['my_option'] );
update_option( 'my_option', $clean_data );
}
}
Governance and visibility
Nick Hamze is curating the Featured Plugins Experiment by hand. Some people would rather have a fully automated algorithm, but manual curation is the better call for the community right now. Algorithms get gamed. A person can tell whether a developer actually answers people in the support forums, or whether the UX shows any “care and intentionality.”
The experiment also sits inside the wider shifts we are seeing in the directory for 2025 and 2026. It rewards developers who solve problems that “The Big Five” plugins, the ones that have dominated the repo for a decade, do not already cover.
If the Featured Plugins Experiment is eating your dev hours, hand it to me. I have been wrestling with WordPress since the 4.x days.
Where to start
If you write plugins, take this as your reason to clean up the repo. Drop the libraries you do not need, keep the readme accurate, and for the love of Gutenberg, use the official Slack channel to give the curators some context. The Featured Plugins Experiment is a way out of the zero install graveyard, but only if the code holds up to a read.
