Author: Tom (Page 379 of 427)

This is the second post in the Thinking Holistically About WordPress Plugins as Products series.

In this series of posts, I’m sharing my thoughts on what it means to think holistically about WordPress plugins as products rather than simple extensions for WordPress.

In the first post in the series, I defined this by saying:

Thinking holistically about WordPress Plugins is about the top-to-bottom, end-to-end experience that goes into building and that will go into using the product.

I generally consider the top-to-bottom aspect of plugins as the developer’s experience and the end-to-end aspect of plugins as the user’s experience.

So while sharing specific tips for developing WordPress plugins, I’ll be looking at the developer’s experience – or the top-to-bottom approach – thinking holistically about WordPress plugins.

Continue reading

This is the first post in the Thinking Holistically About WordPress Plugins as Products series.

It goes without saying that one of the best (and worst) things about WordPress is the 20,000-some-odd plugins that are available. It would seem that there’s literally a plugin for everything, and if there’s not, then one can be or inevitably will be created.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that because a plugin is available that it will fulfill its intended purpose or will do it well.

Talking about plugins and whether or not they’re well-built or if they should be vetted against some type of set of rules are hot topics right now so I’ve no desire to rehash those topics here. Instead, I think there needs to be a shift in thinking by developers who are building WordPress plugins for a living or consider themselves to be professional WordPress developers.

Rather than looking to churn out as many plugins as possible that do as many things as possible, what if we were to begin thinking about WordPress plugins as products?

That is, what if we were to think holistically about what goes into a plugin rather than just source code?

Continue reading