Plugins - The Mainstay of Wordpress

I love WordPress…

…and there are loads of reasons why!

It’s so easy to create a unique, personal website that can be fit for almost any purpose. I’ve looked at altern­atives in the blogging field and even seri­ously capable content management systems like Joomla and Drupal, but I still come back to WordPress.

In the last couple of weeks, we’ve even decided to port one of our sites back from Joomla to WordPress. We thought we needed some of the advanced Joomla features but instead, we found that there was nothing we wanted that couldn’t be done in WordPress. We also found that the increased complexity of Joomla increased out workload because our clients were unable to “work it out for themselves”.

Add Ons

The beauty of the WordPress system is that you can do almost anything you want without having to delve into complex code. The modular system of themes and plugins mean that you don’t have to get your hands dirty if you really don’t want to.

And without getting your hands dirty, you can make your site unique simply because there are so many possible combin­a­tions of theme and plugin available. You don’t even need to hunt the internet. Many of the best add ons are available straight from the WordPress​.org website!

Often these add ons are updated on a very regular basis and because of the modular set-​up, plugins and themes are kept separate from the source code. This means that code updates don’t require a marathon session of rein­stalling all the changes you’d made to the last version.

Plugins

Because there is so much to choose from, I’m now coming-​out as a self confirmed Plugin Junkie. I simply can’t stop tweaking and adding things to my blog.

When I first started devel­oping this site, I stated that it was really for my own benefit. Since then, my plugin addiction is some­thing that I have been able to feed on a very regular basis.

Not All Plain Sailing

Unfortunately, I have entered choppy waters on a couple of occa­sions. My host has pulled the plug on my site because some­thing (probably a plugin) has caused a peak in demand on my shared server. I’ve also come across a couple of plugins that really don’t do what they said on the tin.

For this reason, I have used this site as a testing bed for my other sites. Although I don’t really want this site to go down, I would prefer it happened to me than a client!

Plugin Heaven

Ultimately this has led to a very Plugin Heavy WordPress install­ation. I currently have a massive 47 plugins uploaded to this site.

So, I’ve decided that I need to weed this out a little and, I think I’ve decided how.

I’m going to review the plugins I’m using. I’ve decided that, if I can write a review that pursuades me a plugin should stay. Then it will!

Of course, there are hundreds of plugins I’ve not got to yet. So if I’m using a mod that can be improved on else­where, please let me know in the comments!