refactor(developer-guide): improve plugin development guide

[babblebey]

This pull request significantly improves the documentation for developing plugins with semantic-release, making it clearer, more accurate, and easier to follow for new and experienced plugin authors. The guide now uses modern JavaScript conventions, clarifies the plugin lifecycle, provides more detailed context object documentation, and improves examples for configuration, validation, and error handling.

Key improvements include:

Plugin Lifecycle & Project Setup

• Clarified how to decide which lifecycle hooks to implement, updated terminology from "steps" to "lifecycle hooks," and linked to relevant documentation for release steps. The project setup section now recommends modern JavaScript practices, such as using ES modules and updating folder structure advice. [1] [2]

Code Examples & Validation

• Updated code examples to use ES module syntax (import/export), improved validation examples to show how to check plugin options, and demonstrated proper error handling using SemanticReleaseError and AggregateError. [1] [2] [3]

Context Object Reference

• Expanded and reorganized the documentation for the context object, detailing which keys are available at each lifecycle hook and what data they contain. This provides a much clearer reference for plugin authors.

Environment Variables & Logging

• Clarified how to access environment variables via context.env and how to use the provided logger for consistent plugin output. [1] [2]

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Project	Deployment	Actions	Updated (UTC)
semantic-release-docs	Ready	Preview, Comment	Jul 1, 2026 4:06pm