DEV Community

Cover image for I got tired of manually checking the same things before every WordPress handoff, so I built a plugin
Noshi
Noshi

Posted on

I got tired of manually checking the same things before every WordPress handoff, so I built a plugin

Every time I finished a WordPress build, there was a stretch of work that had nothing to do with the actual site. Turn indexing back on. Delete the test posts. Check if WP_DEBUG got left on. Look for a stray debug.log file. Make sure nobody's still using "admin" as a username. None of it was hard on its own. It just lived in five different places, and I kept doing the same round trip through the dashboard every single time.

After enough projects, I stopped trusting myself to remember all of it from memory, so I built a plugin to do that round trip for me: Noshi-Kanamer.

What I wanted was pretty simple: check the site, clean up what I can, and leave something behind that shows what I checked. In practice that's three steps: check, fix, prove.

 

Check: it scans for the stuff that's easy to miss right before a handoff, noindex still on, WP_DEBUG still on, a debug.log file sitting there, test posts nobody deleted, the default admin username, XML-RPC still open, file editing still enabled from the dashboard.

Noshi-Kanamer Pre-Launch tab showing the Checks list mid progress, most items checked
This is usually where I start the final handoff check now. Green means done, everything else is still waiting on me.

 

Fix: for the things it can safely handle on its own, the action is right there: delete the test posts it created, flush the rewrite rules, or remove the debug log. For the rest, like WP_DEBUG or file editing, it points you to the snippet or settings page you need instead of making you hunt for it.

 

Prove: once things are clean, it puts together a plain-text report you can hand to a client or just keep for yourself, so I don't have to rely on "yeah, I checked all that" when I hand the site over.

Noshi-Kanamer Pre-Launch tab with all checks complete and the Ready to Launch banner
Small thing, but seeing this before handoff feels better than closing a dozen tabs and hoping I didn't miss one.

It's still free, and I'm still working on it based on what breaks or feels missing as I use it on real projects. I usually install it near the end of a project, run through the checklist, generate the report, then remove it before handing things over.

If you've got your own version of this checklist living in your head, or taped to a monitor somewhere, I'd like to know what's on it.

 

Noshi-Kanamer: Pre-launch checklist & client handoff toolkit for WordPress

If you want to try it on your next handoff, it's on WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/noshi-kanamer/
Demo: https://youtu.be/z85RmxMHCIc

Top comments (0)