WordPress Plugins – The strength and the weakness of WordPress

Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 10:35 am

Before I start my rant let me say that I appreciate the effort put in by numerous developers creating plugins. They add a functionality that greatly enhances the usability and power of WordPress as a blogging platform. I will apologize in advance to those that continue to improve and support their work this is not aimed at those.

There is a problem though with the current structure of how people look at plugins especially in the non marketing world.

Often developers create a great plugin, get a lot of people using it and then just get plain bored with continuing the development of it.

Not sure why that happens but it does happen way too often. My guess is because it is done gratis and they don’t have a way to monetize it.

Yes, they may put up a donation button but that does not necessarily generate sufficient incentive to continue the development as WordPress evolves.

At the same time those that do create a plugin and add a monetization model are skewered for asking for an email or having an offer in their marketing process to give away a free plugin. Yes, they continue to market to those people but if they are ethical (and most are) you can unsubscribe easily. (Of course you then miss the updates.)

These developers despite being seen as the lowest in the world of plugin creators have a vested interest in keeping their plugin fully supported because it helps to fill their marketing funnel.

These plugins are changed and supported well unlike some of the ones that just depend on donations and get bored.

Truthfully I would rather deal with the marketer that has a vested interest in supporting and improving their plugin than with the person that creates a great plugin and has no reason other than kindness or ego to support it.

After seeing a new plugin with a marketing funnel be skewered for their marketing (not for the quality of the plugin) like Tweet My Blog has been at this post where it only focuses on the fact that it only works on WordPress (note it is WordPress plugin – duh), has a way to make money and does not look at the differences between what is on the market and what is not.

Plugins rarely do something that is unique but make doing it easier. If you can code and want to tweak your theme and the code you can (if you know how) or you can upload a plugin and click activate and add options if necessary. Something non tech heads can handle.

Yes I can add my Twitter feed to my sidebar with the proper code, I can use other services to post my RSS feed to Twitter (at a delayed time frame as they only check once an hour) and avoid the marketing.

Now my question to you is the fact that a developer adds a marketing funnel to their delivery of a free plugin enough to skewer them?

Or would you rather deal with someone that does it out of the goodness of their heart, ego or some other factor and then has no reason to support it in the future?

I know what my answer is but would love to hear yours.

Mike Paetzold