Use composer to manage third-party plugins

[MichelleBlanchette]

The WordPress Packagist project mirrors the actual WordPress repository to use via Composer: https://wpackagist.org/

Premium plugins typically have a way to be installed/managed via Composer, as well, such as ACF Pro: https://www.advancedcustomfields.com/resources/installing-acf-pro-with-composer/

However, this will cause the GitHub Action for deployments to take longer since all code needs to be resolved and downloaded for each deployment rather than simply already "cached" in the GitHub repo during checkout. This inefficiency could cause this task to not be worth implementing, though #9 could solve this.

Also, it's pretty nice to have committed the changes each plugin made—though not sure how useful or actionable that is. Additionally, we won't have the plugin code saved via GitHub; however, it will obviously be in our filesystem backups to be recoverable so... 🤷

[MichelleBlanchette]

It seems WP Rocket only talks about building their plugin from GitHub using Composer: https://docs.wp-rocket.me/article/1301-wp-rocket-installation-from-github-using-composer

Not seeing how to install their plugin as a dependency in a different project.

[MichelleBlanchette]

It seems WP Rocket now supports installing the plugin as a dependency via Composer:
https://github.com/wp-media/wp-rocket?tab=readme-ov-file#composer-installation