We Built a Lightweight WordPress Plugin Dependency Manager
If you've ever built a WordPress theme that depends on specific plugins, you probably know the pain:
- Users forget to install required plugins
- Activation steps become messy
- Bulk installs timeout
- Premium plugins need custom handling
- Dependency management slowly turns into boilerplate chaos
We built Polanger Required Plugins (Polanger RP) to solve exactly that.
It's a lightweight, single-file WordPress library that lets themes recommend, install, activate, and update plugins through a native WordPress admin experience — without external dependencies.
Quick Example
Drop one PHP file into your project:
polanger_require_plugins([
'woocommerce',
'elementor',
[
'slug' => 'my-premium-plugin',
'source' => 'license',
],
]);
That's it.
Your users get:
- Native WordPress admin notices
- Dedicated install/update screens
- Bulk install & activation support
- Automatic update detection
No custom UI. No setup headache.
Features
- Single-file architecture (~1300+ LOC)
- Zero external dependencies
- WordPress.org plugin support
- Bundled ZIP support
- External/CDN plugin sources
- License-protected plugin delivery
- Queue-based bulk installer (prevents timeout issues)
- Version-aware update detection
- Native WordPress admin UI
- PHP 7.4+ and WordPress 6.0+ compatible
Security Considerations
We wanted the library to be safe by default, so it includes:
- HTTPS-only external downloads
- Domain whitelisting
- Path traversal protection
- Secure ZIP handling
Why We Built It
TGM Plugin Activation has been an important part of the WordPress ecosystem for years and deserves massive respect.
But modern WordPress projects often need something smaller, easier to maintain, and more aligned with current PHP and WordPress standards.
We wanted a dependency manager we could drop into any project in seconds and completely forget about.
So we built one.
The project is open source under GPL-2.0.
👉 GitHub:
github.com/Polanger/required-plugins
👉 Docs:
polanger.com/polanger-required-plugins-polanger-rp
Would genuinely love feedback from other theme/plugin developers — especially around edge cases, update flows, or dependency management problems you've run into in production.
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