I got tired of manually checking the same things before every WordPress handoff, so I built a plugin

Every time I finished a WordPress build, there was a stretch of work that had nothing to do with the actual site:

• Turn indexing back on
• Delete the test posts
• Check if WP_DEBUG got left on
• Look for a stray debug.log file
• Make sure nobody's still using "admin" as a username

None of it was hard on its own. It just lived in five different places, and I kept doing the same round trip through the dashboard every single time. After enough projects, I stopped trusting myself to remember all of it from memory, so I built a plugin to do that round trip for me: Noshi-Kanamer.

What I wanted

Check the site, clean up what I can, and leave something behind that shows what I checked. In practice that's three steps: check, fix, prove.

Check

It scans for the stuff that's easy to miss right before a handoff:

• noindex still on
• WP_DEBUG still on
• A debug.log file sitting there
• Test posts nobody deleted
• The default admin username
• XML-RPC still open
• File editing still enabled from the dashboard

This is usually where I start the final handoff check now. Green means done; everything else is still waiting on me.

Fix

For the things it can safely handle on its own, the action is right there:

• Delete the test posts it created
• Flush the rewrite rules
• Remove the debug log

For the rest - like WP_DEBUG or file editing - it points you to the snippet or settings page you need instead of making you hunt for it.

Prove

Once things are clean, it puts together a plain-text report you can hand to a client or just keep for yourself, so I don't have to rely on "yeah, I checked all that" when I hand the site over. Small thing, but seeing this before handoff feels better than closing a dozen tabs and hoping I didn't miss one.

Workflow

It's still free, and I'm still working on it based on what breaks or feels missing as I use it on real projects. I usually install it near the end of a project, run through the checklist, generate the report, then remove it before handing things over.

Links

• WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/noshi-kanamer/
• Demo: https://youtu.be/z85RmxMHCIc

If you've got your own version of this checklist living in your head, or taped to a monitor somewhere, I'd like to know what's on it.