Starting today, administrators (specifically anyone with the manage_options capability) can enable any of our pre-approved plugins directly from the administration area of your site. No longer do you need to get your developer involved simply to enable a new plugin on your site — you can do it yourself by visiting the “Plugins & Services” menu found in the VIP section of your WordPress dashboard.
However developers can still forcibly enable a plugin for all sites using that theme with the wpcom_vip_load_plugin() helper function. Plugins loaded using this method cannot be disabled from the administration area of the site.
Prefer not to have administrators enabling new plugins on your site? Have your developer add wpcom_vip_plugins_ui_disable_activation(); to your theme’s functions.php file and the plugin activation links will be disabled.
You can also use this functionality in your development environment if you’d like by adding the following code to your theme:
if ( ! function_exists( 'wpcom_is_vip' ) ) {
require_once( WP_CONTENT_DIR . '/themes/vip/plugins/vip-do-not-include-on-wpcom/wpcom-vip-plugins-ui/wpcom-vip-plugins-ui.php' );
}
It will add a new menu item to the “Plugins” menu.
WordPress VIP Lobby 
Is this rolled out already? Ain’t see no “Plugins & Services” in VIP dashboard or it’s menu.
Oops, fixed.
Before I selected
activate_pluginsas the capability to use, I tested to make sure that this was a capability that administrators had on WordPress.com. I realize now that my testing was flawed (callingcurrent_user_can()too soon). I have changed the capability tomanage_optionsand added a filter on the value while I was at it.Nice, looks good.