The Zend Developer Zone has a new post with information about some updates from the WordPress project about what plugin authors must do to be compliant with the rules of the WordPress Plugin Directory.

After five years, the WordPress plugin team has updated the Plugin Guidelines. These are the guidelines that WordPress plugin authors must comply with to be included in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

The guidelines were soft-launched last month so that they could be vetted by the larger plugin developer community community. On November 1st, 2017, they were officially announced “Revised Guidelines Are Live” by Mika Epstein.

Overall, these guidelines are good. They are solid, well communicated and clear to anyone who reads them.

The ZDZ post focuses in on just two of the guidelines that were updated with a few brief thoughts in each:

• #4. Keep your code (mostly) human readable
• #9, The plugin and its developers must not do anything illegal, dishonest, or morally offensive

They point out that, while the intent is good for #9, the term "morally offensive" is very broad and could be interpreted in many ways by many different groups.