Plug ins are great, but…

 By: Ben Partch » On: April 27th, 2008

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There are a few Wordpress plug-ins that I always use no matter what site I am building. They are in no particular order:

• Google Sitemap Generator
• Feedburner Feedsmith
• Simple Tags
• Subscribe to Comments (assuming there are going to be comments)
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
• Optimal Title

While I have just given some link love to the creators of my most used plug ins, that is not the point of this article.

The other day a friend of mine gave me a list of plug ins to check out that was quite long. I have no idea if he actually uses these or plans to use each and everyone of them on his blog at some point, but I got to thinking. What a nightmare it would be to use this many plug ins. I mean as often as they release a new version of WP, you will have to hope that the author of each plug in has updated it to work with the next version. If not, you either have to live without it until they do update, or your blog might look different than you had originally planned.

So my point is that while plug ins are great and I thank the author of each and everyone of them for their time and effort, I believe it is a bad idea to rely too heavily on 3rd party plug ins. (unless you are able to fix the issues yourself) as it just adds more work for you when it is time to upgrade and I am afraid this might lead to some not upgrading at all.

What are your thoughts and how many plug ins do you use?

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One Response to “Plug ins are great, but…”

1. Vinnie  Says:
   June 16th, 2008 at 11:23 am

   Most plugins I use are to make my life easier. For example, I use MobileAdmin to get a mobile-friendly admin area for WP so I can post from a smartphone, and the Postie plugin so I can post by email.

   Actually the only user-facing plugin I use is one that most people won’t ever see: an iphone-friendly version of the main site. I just don’t see the need to trick out a blog anymore, and keep plugins updated, and watch security lists etc. Too much work for something that I’m really doing for fun