Wordpress Developer-Friendly Plugins List
We spend quite a bit of time with the awesome open source Content Management System Wordpress. A huge amount of Wordpress’ power comes from the vast range of plugins available. On the flip side: As a developer trying to create a website with fast, clean, valid code, plugins can cause problems by injecting styles into their HTML output or into the head of the template. We’ve also had issues with plugins loading their own versions of common JavaScript libraries, ending up with redundant and possibly conflicting JS loads.
It’s understandable that this can happen. Plugins are generally designed to allow functionality without any template editing, and automatically including CSS and JS means that your plugin can look “right” to most users. However, we believe that plugins which include this kind of code should have “Developer Friendly” options, which allow you to turn off these includes and keep full control over how your site is styled.
A specific example: The PXS Mail Form plugin is a simple, light WP plugin which looks for code and replaces it with, yes, an email form. It’s getting rather old (last update was 2005), and there are mail form plugins with greater functionality, but PXS wins over the newer, flashier ones because of this simple feature:
It allows you to turn this extra CSS off.
Of course, a developer who’s smart enough to know they don’t want multiple lightbox.js versions embedded in their template or style declarations in their content is probably smart enough to also know how to hack it out of the plugin responsible, and we’ve done so on many occasions. This causes problems for upgrading though, we have to document these changes and remember to re-apply them whenever the plugin is upgraded, which makes more work for us, and more expense for our clients.
So, whenever we can, we try to use plugins which either don’t do these “unfriendly” things, or give us the option to disable them. So this is a list of plugins we’ve discovered which are Developer Friendly:
Ads For Your Blog: Simple Code for Calling OpenX’s Single Page Call Within Wordpress Using current_post
Advertising is one of those “necessary evils” of the web, and of non-ecommerce blogs in particular. For blogs which aren’t associated with a particular product or revenue-generating business, advertising is the main way to pay the bills. It’s not something which generally enhances a site, but we try our hardest to ensure that it’s not [...]
Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists, or: Why Oxygen Kiosk doesn’t offer SEO Services
I had a chat with a new client the other day about why we don’t consider “Search Engine Optimization” an optional extra, or even a service that we offer.
This morning there was a great string of posts on Merlin Mann’s twitter:
If you’re “insulted” by criticism of SEO, go write a novel or work at a [...]
Open Migration: Rescuing Content and Images from Squarespace
We’re currently helping our clients at Dubspot migrate their blog from Squarespace to a new system which will be built around a multi-user setup of Wordpress.
Squarespace’s propaganda goes on about “Total Data Portability”, and how “your data is yours to keep”. However, when it comes to moving to another system, there’s no automated method to [...]
You can read more of our blog posts.