A few days ago I wrote about how I landed on the name CartRules for my new plugin business.
What I didn’t expect was that naming trouble wasn’t over! I had my first free plugin ready to submit to WordPress.org, and I assumed that part would be the easy bit.
Well, it wasn’t. WordPress.org rejected the plugin twice, for two completely different reasons, before it finally got through.
This post walks through what actually happened: the two rejections, the emails that got things moving again, and everything that goes into renaming a plugin once it’s already partway through the review process. If you’re planning to submit a plugin to the .org repository yourself, some of this might save you a round trip or two.
Why I submitted my plugin to WordPress.org
I built a small WooCommerce plugin that restricts the cart to products from a single category at a time. It’s not a complicated plugin, but it’s genuinely useful, and it also gives people a low-commitment way to run into the CartRules idea before they’d ever consider paying for anything.
This was a brand new submission, and honestly, my first ever submission to the WP Repo… so I was going through the review process from scratch.
Because I’d just spent time naming the CartRules brand for my project, that decision turned out to matter a lot more than I expected once the review started.
The first rejection
I originally called this plugin “Allow Only 1 Category in Cart”; it described exactly what the plugin did.
WordPress.org trained AI didn’t see it that way:
✨ The display name is overly descriptive and begins with generic wording instead of a distinctive leading term. It is also quite close to existing plugin naming patterns built around “Allow Only 1 … in Cart,” which may cause confusion in the directory.
This is one of them, probably:
Based on that, the AI also made its first counter-proposal:
An alternative name may be: ✨ Business Bloomer Category Cart Restriction for WooCommerce
Boy, I definitely didn’t like that!
This is a new plugin company, and has nothing to do with Business Bloomer; this is the first plugin in the repo under the new “CartRules” brand name.
On top of that, the prefix I was using throughout the PHP code was too short. The WordPress.org guidelines are specific here: a prefix needs to be distinctive enough, and two or three letters usually isn’t considered acceptable. But this was a super easy fix, the real problem was that I wasn’t super happy with the plugin name.
Renaming it to fit the correct brand
Since I’d already settled on CartRules as the brand, getting this free plugin to use that same identity was the obvious fix. I renamed it to “Cart Rules: One Category in Cart for WooCommerce“.
I resubmitted with the new name and the new prefix. The name was specific now, and the prefix was long enough to be genuinely distinctive. I was fairly confident this was the end of it.
But WordPress.org came back a second time:
Thank you for clarifying. However, “Cart Rules” is generic wording that describes plugin functionality. Using it as a company name does not make the plugin name sufficiently distinctive in the directory.
Please use a clearly distinctive identifier at the beginning, for example:
– BusinessBloomer Category Cart Restriction for WooCommerce
– BusinessBloomer One-Category Cart for WooCommerce“WooCommerce” is acceptable here because it appears after “for.” Please update the name in the plugin header and readme, upload the revised file, and explicitly request a matching new slug, such as businessbloomer-category-cart-restriction .
Once again, I didn’t like these suggested names. Also, some friends had already warned me about that…:
The email that changed everything
At this stage I started to get a little frustrated with WordPress.org AI always giving me the same name ideas, so I decided to give it some more context, be more proactive, and come up with more name options:
Thank you for the clarification.
“CartRules” is the name of my new plugin brand: https://cartrules.com/. This will have its own voice, target (merchants), have lots of free plugins in the repo, and hopefully a handful of PRO plugins too. This won’t be the only “CartRules” plugin in the repo.
I’d like to propose:
-CartRules One Category in Cart for WooCommerce
-CartRules One-Category Cart for WooCommerce
-CartRules Allow Only One Category in Cart for WooCommerce
-CartRules Restrict Cart to One Category for WooCommerce
-CartRules Category Cart Restriction for WooCommerceStylized as a single word, “CartRules” doesn’t sound like a generic description of the plugin’s function – similar to how other approved listings use a coined single-word mark (e.g. “Jetpack,” “Kadence”) ahead of a descriptive subtitle. This plugin is the first in that line.
If this still doesn’t meet the distinctiveness bar, let me know
Thank you!
Rodolfo
Worst case scenario: they say no 🙂
Getting the green light
With the new name, this time it went through:
Hi,
We have renamed the plugin slug to “cartrules-one-category-in-cart-for-woocommerce”.
Please update your plugin files (including the display name, textdomain, and prefixes) to match the new slug, then upload the new zip file here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/developers/add/.
We recommend using the Plugin Check plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/plugin-check/) to identify any fundamental issues prior to uploading.
Regards,
The plugin is now under code review and I hope to hear from the human team soon!
Conclusion
These two rounds of rejection made me pay a lot more attention to naming than I probably would have otherwise.
After all, it’s the first ever time I try to submit a plugin to the repo.
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