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?
