Plugins for WordPress

Plugins for WordPress are great. They extend and add functionality to your WordPress website that is not supported by the core and make it possible for users to customize their website without any knowledge of code.

Plugins however also cause problems. Recently the TimThumb for WordPress image resizing plugin caused quite a stir in the WordPress community as security flaws in the script left many websites open to security attacks. Plugins can be unstable, they can break your website and stop certain features from working. They can even lock you out of your admin login.

WordPress Experts on Plugins

At WordCamp Cape Town, many WordPress experts warned against the use of plugins, stating that the more plugins you have the more problems you are bound to encounter. This is not to say that all plugins or plugins in general are bad, but that badly coded plugins without proper support and testing could cause problems for your WordPress install.

Even if the plugins used are thoroughly tested and work without issues they might not work together very well in harmony.

Plugin Conflict

Not all WordPress plugins work well together. Plugins are created by various third party developers and as such they are not developed with the express goal of working with every other plugin out there. WordPress plugins can often give errors or cause conflicts with other plugins. This typically happens after upgrading, installing or activating a new plugin or theme, or upgrading WordPress.

The most common problems we’ve experienced is with Plugins that don’t en-queue their javascript properly (This can cause conflicts and pages to break) and Incorrectly configured plugins that slow down sites (like WPML – The WordPress Multilingual plugin).

Even if your new plugin doesn’t give any errors, it might still be breaking your website by causing other plugins or functionality not to work properly. This makes it essential to test your website after any upgrades or changes have been made.

Support

Free plugins are distributed to use “as is” and you cannot expect any support. If the Free plugin developer has a blog or a website you could contact them for help, but they are not obligated to help you and as these plugins are free projects that they run on the side they might not be able to help you as they’d have other commitments.

Most free plugins are distributed with a GNU license, which states that the plugins are free to use but without any warranty.

At LightSpeed we often work with GetShopped.org’s WP-e-Commerce plugin. WP-e-Commerce is the perfect example of a good plugin that needs to pay attention to support and documentation, as it’s almost non-existent. We are currently helping them to improve their support documentation, and hopefully they will be improving forum support in the near future as well.

LightSpeed recommended plugins:

We work with WordPress plugins every day, trying to build the best WordPress based web solutions for our clients. In the process, we get to see plugins of all shapes, sizes and quality.

Gravity forms is incredible, with really impressive support. We have never encountered any problems with it.This plugin has a ton of hooks for the developers to use and allows us to easily extend the plugin.

We’ve put together this list of some of the top plugins that we can recommend based on our extensive experience.

• WordPress SEO
• Google Analytics for WordPress
• Gravity Forms
• WPtouch Pro
• Jetpack
• Vaultpress
• Akismet
• W3 total cache
• HyperDB – only for advanced wordpress peeps
• bbPress
• BuddyPress

Tips from our LightSpeed developers:

• Use a namespace/class
• Make sure to enqueue your js and styles correctly and not on all pages

We’ve also found that Yoast maintains an excellent resource for plugin and theme reviews. The Studio Press guys also do a great job with the genesis theme and related plugins.