Love Note To Plugin Authors
Lorelle from Lorelle on WordPress has made February ‘plugin month’ at her site. She is highlighting a number of plugins over the course of the month and is also putting up very useful posts for plugin development. Her latest post ‘A Love Letter to WordPress Plugin Authors’ is a must read for anyone writing plugins. I agree with almost everything she says, except about tab placement. If a plugin I install puts a tab on the top level, I often edit the plugin and move it where it belongs 
I’m anal that way!
I create this plug site specifically because the original Xinha4WP page and comments were getting out of control. So we put up forums and the response has been VERY positive. Thanks for everyone who is speaking up about issues so we can try to fix them.
Anyway, Lorelle has drawn a line in the sand challenging plugin authors to write well crafted and organized plugins and follow that up with some form of support. I agree 100%.
One idea I had… (hey maybe an idea for a future plugin!) is to possibly put something together that can track all the tabs added to WordPress by plugins and allow you to move them where you want via an options screen. That would be very useful. Not sure it could be done codewise, but there are hooks for everything else!
February 7th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
I am in total agreement with you that Plugins should not be put at the top level. Put them where they are the most useful. If not used, stick them under Plugins so I don’t have to think when I go looking for it six months after installing the Plugin.
As I work on this month long series, I’m so pissed off at the volume of Plugin authors who write useless and inane information to introduce their Plugin and then offer no features list, no clear description other than “this will work good with your blog comments” - what does it do?
I have even found people who have set up whole sites dedicated to their plugin, and there is no About or Description or Feature Page to tell you what this thing does. A changelog does not describe anything except what you did on the last update. I find those at the top of the list all the time. ARGH.
So I hope I’m getting through to the WordPress Plugin authors I love, like you, to help them help us love them more. Thanks for the support!
February 7th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I agree about the lack of plugin info and I’ll admit I can be guilty of that too at times - once it works who wants to write documentation? But you quickly learn if the info isn’t there, 500 people are going to email you the same question
I honestly threw this site together because it was clear I need to document/support more and I wanted to mess with bbPress. Prefect opportunity. It went live a few weeks ago and I still know there are holes out there! That said - I try to include About and Help tabs in my plugins - easier that way.
On a side note - my plugins tend to have subtabs like SK2. I really should take that code and build a ’skeleton framework’ for people to use. So many projects, so little time!
Keep up the great work! I’m finding plugins I didn’t know about every time you put up a post!