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The main reason i selected wordpress to power the new T3 was the pretty big plugin directory of wordpress. The plugin directory as i write this post serves more than 2018 plugins with 4.000.000 downloads. That’s pretty impressive but expected from the #1 blogtool in the world. Developers and authors deserve many credits but i can’t deny most of them are crap in my opinion always. After hours of searching, browsing, inspecting the plugins over the wp directory for weeks, i am left with a negative impression.
My bad impression comes from the fact that most of the plugin authors never heard the word “performance”. Let’s get serious wordpress plugin system is cool but for Pit’s shake the memory usage, is super hight. 9-11MB average with only 10 plugins ? Yeap that’s right these are the numbers in my case. People will say it’s not much but when you see some of the most successful php products out there like vbulletin or IPB to use only the half of that of wordpress makes you wonder. Maybe it’s me, i have adopted a way of thinking that says performance must be balanced with features.
Excess use of hardcoded html, useless queries everywhere, useless check and rechecks, removal of the default filters just to serve a particular needs and changing completely the way content is served, forced css insertion and many more. WP devs have given the opportunity to do almost everything in wp through plugins, but people tend to forget and disrespect that fact. In my case i needed to find a couple of plugins that in half i had to directly change the php code to change the way they worked.
These are some of the reasons that forced me to build most of the custom plugins here in T3. For the numbers, out of the 10 plugs i use 5 are custom. There is one good thing with the huge plugin directory. In most of the cases there are at least 5 plugins that do what you want in one or another way, so it’s pretty hard not to find a plugin for your needs. Unless you are me, aouch.
For example a contact form. There is the super cforms 2, way too many features for me and as a result way too heavy. WP-Contact 1|2|3, they are good plugins and each can serve a particular need but they all have flaws. Hardcoded html, forced css or no spam protection. I could go on without even considering the scattering plugins or modded plugins that you can find over google and they are not listed on the official wp plug directory.
In the end of the story i built my contact plug with recaptcha and without the above flaws, you can check by following the Contact Me link ontop. I found my self in similar situations for the syntax highlighting, the file list and the database backup. I will release them in the near future but still i want my time to get used to the wp and learn all the hidden tips and tweaks of the wp core. I am not bitching i think that way i will get to my goal faster by developing my own plugs but what happens to 90% of wp users/admins that have no idea about php, mysql…. Tough Question, maybe i am overreacting and underestimate the people who use wp but for now that’s my opinion.
Among the scripts on wp plugins directory you will also find some great examples, some are hard to notice because they are not so popular some others are not. WP-PostViews or WP-PostRatings and the WP-Pagenavi. It’s funny but those 3 come from the same author, as i read he might not be very active as in the past but he has kept his works updated to work with the latest version of wp, despite the fact of releasing beta versions.
Searching among 2000 entries is tough and maybe i as other people too are lost through searching for the best solution for each need, maybe if there was a better browsing interfaced more categorized, more easy to distinct the good among the crap people life would be much easier.
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2 Responses to “Selecting WordPress Plugins”
Ilham Says:
April 27th, 2008 at 12:25 am
This was a great article. I also think that a lot of these plugins could use some good re-workings. But I think this primarily stems from the fact that a lot of plug-in developers are people who might not have done a course in coding for the web. Rather who self taught themselves, although this is great and an amazing thing; the fact is that a course or teacher/Professor will always show you the tricks and tips that make you an awesome programmer. One that writes not only safe but light weight codes.
Chris T Says:
April 28th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
I really respect the work of people who simply code in their free time just to offer to the wp community, but because of the low level of php knowledge among the end users these flaws are never fixed.
I was using at the beginning a 3rd party plugin for auto cron backup, the author had made so much work to add flashy things, such as live progress of the backup, selective backup tables, email backups etc etc, but he had no idea how the hell to schedule a wp event.
He forgot to implement the most important thing to be able to schedule the freakin time, and during uninstall the custom event hook stayed behind. The very basics are what make the plugin good with good prospectives for the future.
So the DBC Backup plugin was born, in a few days i will release it, it’s ready but i want my first public plug for wp to be absolutely perfect in what it offers.
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