One of the great pluses of WordPress is that there are so many plugins available to add those nifty extra bits of functionality which aren’t in the core but which make your site special – or just allow it to meet your minimum requirements. Most of those plugins are free which is another big plus of the open source way of doing things. Donations are encouraged – although since I’m doing this an an invidual and not as a business, I prefer to put back by sharing my knowledge rather than making donations. If I was doing this professionally, I’d do it the other way.
The downside is that the author of your plugin might move on. While building Egyptological, one author of some really top plugins announced he had left college, got a job and couldn’t continue to support his plugins. Where does that leave you if you rely on that plugin for your blog?
Hmmm. Having worked as an IT Director and managed many software builds, I have learned to tell me developers to think about maintaining the software in the long term. A shortcut now could cause problems in future. It’s not worth it. So have I eschewed plugins entirely. Of course not. I’ll use plugins in various circumstances:
- “Core” plugins. We don’t know what they will be as I write this, but they are coming soon – plugins supported by the main development team with a largely guaranteed future.
- Plugins which are used by 100,000+ people. If support for the plugin vanishes, it’s a safe bet that somebody will step into the breach.
- Plugins supported by open source communities. For instance I would happily consider the Pods plugin if I needed custom data types.
- Plugins which display data but don’t affect how it is stored – that means I should be able to swap easily to an alternative plugin
- Plugins which I can easily replace with my own code
The last is a special case. These are plugins which won’t have a long-term future on the site but which mean I can get functionality up and running quickly. As my approach to development tends to be RAD (Rapid Application Development), I like to get 80% of functionality in place quickly so it can be assessed and either developed fully or discarded. If I run with them, they will probably be replaced with my own code.
By Kate Phizackerley