The release of WordPress 4.4 is rapidly approaching, but people are still hard at work making this the best version yet. One of the recent tickets being addressed has made a decent amount of headway and seems to be on target for the next release.

The ticket covers a longstanding problem with plugin name collisions. There have been instances where an existing plugin in the WordPress repo, which shares a name with a privately maintained plugin, has an available update. Because the plugins share directory names, hitting the update button means that the private plugin is replaced.

The currently suggested solution is to add an optional “Private” field to the plugin header. Including this would disable update checks against the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Although it is a small change, it should give developers peace of mind when naming and working on site-specific plugins. Needless to say, we are even more excited for 4.4.