Friday 6 November 2026
Friday turned into a fairly thorough examination of the Niche Clever plugin estate. I’d wanted to make progress towards resubmitting Niche Clever Interactive to WordPress.org, but there were some housekeeping and testing jobs worth finishing first. They ended up occupying much of the day.
Getting the records straight
The first job was to reconcile the documentation with the software actually running. Several records still described version 1.0.4 of Niche Clever Interactive as the current release candidate, although 1.0.5 had already superseded it. The context packs and handoffs needed bringing into line, so that the next review would start from the right version rather than a convincing account of the wrong one.
That exercise also turned up a couple of gaps in the repository arrangements. The privacy plugin and the ticker-diary plugin had been developed locally without GitHub remotes. I created private repositories for both, checked what was going into them, then committed and pushed the outstanding work. The local installations and the repositories now agree, which is a much more comfortable position to be in.
Another round of plugin testing
The main development work was on Niche Clever Interactive Core. Version 1.0.6 took shape during the day, with changes to counter maintenance, administrator presentation and the points raised in earlier WordPress.org reviews.
I went back through the review findings rather than relying on the fact that the automated tests were passing. That led to another set of fixes, followed by a clean uninstall and reinstall on the local WordPress test site. The test checked that uninstalling could remove the plugin’s stored data when requested, and that a fresh installation rebuilt the necessary tables and settings.
There was an accessibility pass as well, covering keyboard use, focus, labels, contrast and the way the public interface behaves on a narrow screen. It found a heading-order problem, which was corrected before the release candidate was finalised.
By the end of the work, version 1.0.6 had been merged into the main branch and tagged. The local installation and package checks passed. That is a useful milestone, although it isn’t quite the same as sending the plugin back to WordPress.org. A live connection test, final visual checks and the reviewer response were still outstanding.
Keeping the rest of the estate in order
The review also made the differences between local, test and live versions more visible. The privacy plugin’s latest changes were already on the live website, while the ticker-diary plugin still had a small version difference between the test site and production. Those distinctions matter when several plugins are moving forward together: otherwise it’s remarkably easy to think a fix has gone live simply because it exists somewhere on the machine.
There was also a local security scan of the test installation. It was useful as another check, but it wasn’t a scan of the public site.
Making the ecosystem visible
Later on, I turned from working on the plugins to trying to explain how they fit together. I’ve been developing a growing collection of Niche Clever plugins, and it’s becoming quite difficult to describe the whole thing in a few sentences. An infographic seemed a better way of showing the connections.
I pulled together the current picture from the project context packs, GitHub and the work we’ve already recorded, separating the knowledge and AI tools from the publishing and distribution components, website infrastructure and development support. It was useful to distinguish what is already running from what is still being developed. The first version needed a correction to the branding, so I rebuilt it using the current Niche Clever logo.
By late evening I had a graphic I could use and had drafted a short LinkedIn introduction, pointing people towards the website and mentioning the new daily Notes from the Workbench entries. It’s one thing to build a collection of tools; it’s another to make the shape of the work intelligible to someone encountering it for the first time.
Where I left it
I didn’t get the WordPress.org resubmission finished on Friday, but the newer candidate was tested, merged and tagged, and the repository records were in better order. The remaining checks and reviewer response can follow.
It was satisfying to finish the day with something visual rather than another test report. The infographic gave me a clearer way to show how the pieces of Niche Clever are beginning to fit together.
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