A Fool's Wisdom » WordPress Plugins

Broken WordPress Plugin or Theme, Blame Me

Lloyd — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:40:40 +0000

WordPress community superstar and regular web tools collection contributor Jeff Chandler (jeffr0) recently published a passionate article, “Stop Blaming The WordPress Team“. The article is about plugin developers blaming WordPress for too frequent updates without testing of popular plugins. His conclusion ends “So the next time you upgrade WordPress and realize your favorite plugin is broke, don’t blame the WordPress team, blame the source.” There are almost 200 comments on the article, and reading through them I imagine almost all perspectives are represented.

My hope is you don’t blame anyone. Maybe, it’s the core WordPress developers fault, maybe it’s the plugin or theme’s author, but that matters much less than everyone involved staying positively pumped.

The worse possible outcome is plugin developer and theme designer exhaustion. These people are as much the WordPress team as anyone is!

Thank contributors. For many that is all the compensation they are looking for, but don’t berate the contributor that is looking for more.

The blame game doesn’t help. Instead, if the plugins or themes you use are a gift to you (free), blog about, comment on forums, write the authors directly thanking them for the work that you miss because it isn’t working with the newest version of WordPress. Why wait till there is a problem, thank them today.

If you really need to blame someone, blame me. I can take it.

WordPress Trunk, More Feed, Less Plugin

Lloyd — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:59:28 +0000

With changeset 6763 on WordPress trunk (soon to be WordPress 2.5), when I select Full text in Settings > Reading I now get… you got it, full text feed.

Ryan wrote in the issue ticket, “Looking back, this was a mistake. By popular demand, we’re returning to disregarding the [] tag when serving feeds.”

And with this change, with everything else WordPress 2.5 will give me, I now need one less plugin. I get to retire Ronald Heft Jr’s Full Text Feed.

Updating WordPress Plugins 2.2 to 2.3 and to 2.5

Lloyd — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 18:08:14 +0000

Jennifer Hodgdon, WordPress Plugin Development Documenter extraordinaire, has written Migrating Plugins and Themes. This seems like a great resource for the WordPress plugin developer who may have been putting off updating their blogs.

As she says, “it’s a Wiki — feel free to add/clarify/edit/fix.”

Jennifer continues to provide essential contributions both to the codex and in development. The new tag interface in Write and Manage->Tags in 2.5 are largely her work. Jennifer, I salute you!

WordPress 2.5 beta is coming soon!