Rendar Prepublish Checks

A WordPress plugin that shows article quality checks live in the block editor while an author writes — featured image, image alt text, tags, categories, required custom fields — so problems are visible before an article goes out.

Status: advisory only. This release evaluates and reports; it does not hold anything back from publishing. The enforcement subsystems (publish gate, scheduled re-check, issue store, failure notifications, admin issue queue) are in the codebase but locked off: rendar_pc_enforcement_enabled() returns false unconditionally, even with RENDAR_PC_ENFORCEMENT === true. Do not set the constant expecting protection. Unlocking it requires the issue lifecycle plus publish/schedule and override acceptance against real WordPress, not merely changing a constant.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.6+ (the editor panel mounts through components that moved into @wordpress/editor in 6.6 — see docs/ENVIRONMENT.md)
• PHP 7.4+
• Optional: Advanced Custom Fields, for the required-custom-fields check

Below the minimum, the plugin shows an admin notice and loads nothing else.

What it does

• Editor panel. An always-on document-sidebar panel and a pre-publish panel show each check's result as the author works. The panel always answers "what happens when this is published", regardless of the status being saved to.
• Built-in checks (all ship at warning severity): featured-image, featured-image-min-width, featured-image-ideal-width, image-alt-text, post-tags, post-categories, required-custom-fields.
• Settings → Pre-Publish Checks. Choose post types in scope, per-check severity (error / warning / off), featured-image width thresholds (0 = off) and whether classic content is exempt from content checks.
• Decorative images. Authors can mark an image as decorative so the alt-text check accepts it. The marker is stored in post meta, never in block markup, so deactivating the plugin leaves no invalid blocks behind.
• Watermark. Posts created before the plugin was first activated are not held to the checks; the watermark is set once and never moved.

Applicability and scope

The post-type setting offers public, REST-enabled post types with editor and custom-fields support (WordPress does not expose registered post meta over REST without custom-fields). The default is post only. Submission and reads intersect the stored names with currently eligible registered types, so a stale or forged option cannot widen scope; clearing every box gives an empty scope. Meta registration runs on init at PHP_INT_MAX, after theme post types registered at default or later priorities; post types first registered after init are outside that guarantee.

Built-in checks declare versioned requirements (docs/API.md). A taxonomy not registered on a post type yields not_applicable, not a false failure; registration with no assignments still fails. Missing thumbnail/editor support skips the corresponding checks. Missing ACF APIs return unavailable for required fields; unavailable is never a pass.

Extending

The stable extension surface is documented in docs/API.md: three hooks (rendar_prepublish_checks_definitions, rendar_prepublish_checks_block_images, rendar_prepublish_checks_settings_sections), the result helpers and the read-only context. Core is deliberately neutral — site-specific editorial policy belongs in a site extension (an mu-plugin, typically). A worked example lives in tests/fixtures/example-policy/; it is never packaged.

Automatic updates

The static Update URI: https://updates.rendar.digital/rendar-prepublish-checks prevents WordPress.org from offering an unrelated plugin; it is an identifier, not the API base. The updater reads this repository's public GitHub Release metadata and requires no site configuration. Define RENDAR_UPDATES_DISABLED as true in wp-config.php only to opt out. WordPress manages normal plugin auto-update opt-in and cron. Network-activate this plugin on multisite to register its update hooks across the network.

Release by changing the header Version and RENDAR_PC_VERSION together to a stable X.Y.Z, committing and testing, tagging vX.Y.Z, pushing the tag, and publishing a non-draft GitHub Release. .github/workflows/release.yml runs tests, validates the tag/version/constant, reuses bin/build-zip, then attaches rendar-prepublish-checks.zip (root rendar-prepublish-checks/) and info.json. The metadata includes the exact GitHub package URL, release tag, UTC generation time, and the matching CHANGELOG.md section. A -dev version is deliberately not releasable: a release tag cannot match it.

Development

bash tests/run.sh       # lint, updater contract, unit, render and contract tests
bash tests/build-zip.sh # reproducible release zip of the shipping plugin only

tests/test-updater.php (part of tests/run.sh) needs a real WordPress core: set WP_CORE_DIR or run bin/provision-wp-core to fetch CI's pinned version (docs/wp-core-pin.md); it skips itself with a message if WP_CORE_DIR is unset outside CI, and CI hard-fails instead.

An opt-in disposable real-WordPress acceptance run lives in tests/integration/ (see its README and docs/integration-acceptance.md).

The release zip contains only rendar-prepublish-checks.php, README.md, CHANGELOG.md, inc/ and assets/.

Honest scope

The committed unit tests exercise stubbed WordPress contracts (hook, route and meta registration, boot gating, the evaluator against an in-memory WordPress) and a simulated JS render. They are not a substitute for integration against real WordPress's parse_blocks() and WP_HTML_Tag_Processor, GenerateBlocks, ACF or a browser.

Known limitation: core suppresses the pre-publish slide-in sidebar for saves targeting pending, so that checklist does not surface on those saves. The always-on document panel still does.

License

GPL-2.0-or-later. See LICENSE.