I am Mark, soon 40 , I teach sports in high school

see you,

Mark, my little blog moto

One thing Mark Jaquith said at WordCamp was that plugin developers should “write better plugins.”

That might sound like a cop out to some, but it is very true. I’m not a plugin developer, but I can only guess that it’s possible (although I don’t know either way) that there could be a lack of documentation and/or a lack of published guidelines to facilitate the writing of better plugins.

If it’s any consolation, the WP team knows that the plugin system has major room for improvement, and they seem to want to do something about it.

It’s a bummer that you missed the convention because you have a valid and well presented argument.

Thanks for joining the conversation on this important issue.

Never have used Joomla. I have however wasted an entire weekend fixing the mess caused by plugins that aren’t compatible with new versions. I’ve spent months with broken RSS feeds due to these issues. I’ve seen people abandon entire blogs due to problems that they could not fix. The current state is neither acceptable nor sustainable. This is not alot to integrate and many of these items are already standard and no hassle in Typepad.

Best,
Rachelle

Patrick – I look forward to seeing your notes!

Rachelle – Welcome to WordPress! It is my hope to see you again and to make the platform a joy for you to use. It might also be quite wise of you to change the name of your blog to “Finding David”

Heidi – I just want to hug you. I hope you can be my evangelist on these issues in person this weekend.

Lorelle – The best learnings I’ve ever had were from being self-taught (whether WordPress or anything else). There is one speaker on that list that I think is a poor example for a beginner to learn from as they allow neither comments nor trackbacks on their blog – which since you were a Sobcon attendee I think you would agree misses the point of the blogging conversation.

Plugins were cute when the user base was small. If plugins are to continue in a world were non-techies want self-hosted WordPress – they either need to be validated to work and be forward compatible or incorporated into WordPress in which case a plugin author would be given freedom from updating. The current state is not sustainable, many people are running old versions of WordPress to sidestep this major issue.

The author of Podpress recently shut down his message board due to “a lack of funds”. So I don’t think this is a major issue for most plugin authors – the sense of ownership and contribtuion is and the memory of the efforts must be preserved and appreciated.

I fully realize the difficulty of the challenges, but the practice of shoveling them under the rug needs to stop if the platform is to thrive and survive.

Thanks for listening.

Thank you

http://www.moon25.com

The issue of Plugins and some of the points you have made are also good. Updates, alerts, and other methods to make the use and inclusion of WordPress Plugins, as well as WordPress updates, is critical to the growing success of the product, but incorporation is a tough call. It means Plugin authors lose control and income which comes from donations, gifts, and related sources. For some, while such income doesn’t pay the electricity bill, it does help offset some of the costs of hosting the Plugin and continuing to support it.

There are a lot of WordPress Plugins which many people swear by that I think are unnecessary clutter, and others I think are critical which people just don’t understand and fail to appreciate. Finding the ones “everyone” uses across the board is a tough call.

You’ve brought up a lot to think about and hopefully some of it will be covered, but that’s a heavy load for a fun weekend of talking and learning about WordPress.

Sorry you won’t be there.

Heidi

Best,
Rachelle