240 - 'P' is for Plugins

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Hello, It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WP. Today is for P for Plugins.

Preamble

So much to say on plugins, but we’ll try and give it some structure by…

• Talk about what they are and what if anything makes them different to themes
• Our plugin mistakes and things to watch out for
• Our personal favourite plugins – the essentials, the often not mentioned and hidden gems
• Should we be creating our own rather than cluttering up functions.php?
• Is there a fabled ‘plugin’ overload that we need to be mindful of?
• Are plugins going to be replaced by Blocks?

Plugins, huh, yeah, what are they good for?

• The difference between themes and plugins is largely semantic
• We used to think of themes for layout styling, and plugins for functionality
• Mega Themes challenged that page builders took it a step further and Gutenberg gets us questioning it again with blocks being plugins
• Oxygen – plugin that removes the theme (Divi and Bricks themes that include the page builder. Beaver Builder and Elementor Plugin that reduce the job of a theme)
• Bricks Builder is a theme and wants to stay that way so that there’s no chance of having to support all-the-things that a variety of themes can cause their support

The problem with plugins is….?

• Too many can slow your site… or do they? I have a number of plugins I made that are just a few lines of code… too many = too many conflicts… duplicate loading of asset – Font Awesome
• Free plugins not getting supported / radically changed / advertising.
• Good free plugins looking out of date (hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress) but still working
• Hard to find many plugins in search, some are on Github only as updating for authors on the repository can be a pain
• The review team for plugins have different rules to the themes team (can promote non GPL – rules on promoting also not the same)
• Overload of rivals means that you’re always on the lookout for the next best thing, when you should settle upon a stack that just works.
• We get into a chat about the mergers & acquisitions in the plugin space and whether this is a good / bad thing

Got to love those plugins….?

To make a living doing general client work do we agree that we need these…

A Page Builder (including add-ons for the block editor), caching, security, backups, SEO and contact / subscriptions and anti-spam. Something to manipulate dynamic content and something to create custom fields and CPT’s, a migrate / clone plugin, and do we need a pop-up maker? Oh and what about Image optimisation?

David uses the following:
Well known essentials: Beaver Builder, Beaver Themer, ACF, Updraft plus, Gravity Forms, SEOPress, Custom Post Type UI, WP Rocket (although Cache Enabler and Breeze I like too)
Less known essentials: Gravity forms zero spam / LH Zero spam, Pop-up Maker, Migrate Guru, SVG Support, Query monitor / Usage DD, Better Notifications for WP, Advanced Database Cleaner, SeedProd Pro, Better Search and Replace, WP Mail Catcher, plus… Disable Gutenberg! Oh, and Assistant.
Addon plugins: Stencil for WordPress, ShortPixel Image Optimizer, Mailgun, BB Code settings plugin, Customizer Export/Import. Toolbox for Beaver Builder,

Nathan use the following:
Beaver Builder / Bricks (which is a theme, so it’s disqualified!) , Beaver Themer, ACF, WS Form / Fluent Forms, SEOPress, Updraft, iThemes Security (once again), Patchstack, Malcare, Generate Press Premium (plugin), Black Hole for Bad Bots, Safe SVG.

Final thoughts

I was thinking about how undervalued plugin authors are now in the WordPress ecosystem. As big money has moved into the space much is about the marketing these days.

Hard to find a small plugin (for example one that does SMTP and Mail logging) without it being dominated by larger companies upselling their own, revenue generating plugins.