July 15th, 2006

My Take on the “WordPress Community Slowdown”

It’s been more than a week since Blogging Pro’s WordPress Theme and Plugin challenge ended, but some of David (from Blogging Pro)’s comments about the whole Wordpress community slowdown still nags at me.

He did raise a valid point when he argued that the amount of “really revolutionary” plugins coming out of the community has been falling over the past few months or so. But we must ask ourselves: Are we overstating the problem?

I’ll keep my rant concise. One: Some of the best WordPress plugins are the result of long term incremental development. It doesn’t always start “revolutionary”. Two: A “really revolutionary” plugin isn’t necessary when you can combine multiple so-called “so-so” plugins together to achieve the same effect. Three: How “revolutionary” individual plugins are depends on how you use it. You’d be surprised at how creativity can bring out the power of underrated plugins. Four: Tiny “so-so” plugins ensure that we have something for every problem we face. We don’t always need “great” plugins - but we always need solutions to our problems.

Fifth: There is only need for so many “revolutionary” plugins. As history has proven itself, when there is a need, a solution will be developed to satiate it. Last but not least, the realm of “revolutionary” more often than not belongs to WordPress core developers. Expecting plugin developers to introduce new great features in WordPress is not only heavy handed, but it also deprives core coders of anything to think of (besides debugging, of course). :)

But enough talk. It’s always easier to demonstrate than spout words, so I’ll be launching a monthly series soon, featuring WordPress plugins released that month that while not great enough to deserve David’s “really revolutionary” status, still provide enough new functionality to demonstrate that the WordPress community isn’t dead. Of course, creativity is sometimes required to utilise the full potential of those plugins.

‘Nuff said. Time for me to compile this month’s feature.

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Posted by ZMAng

Filed under Plugins, WordPress

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