Of course it is great to have so many plugins with so many features (1 of the reasons I gave up on Drupal and came back to WordPress was because I browsed ALL modules listed in drupal.org [try to do that in wordpress.org plugin directory ] and found few nice stuff, while WordPress has endless plugins with a lot of features I simply couldn’t find equivalents in Drupal), but a lot of plugins are badly maintained, many are simply abandoned and not supported anymore, and there are even plugin authors that yell on users!

I don’t know how to solve it. I for sure can’t play for commercial plugins that do what current ones do. Maybe if they stopped adding end user features like these image editings and add APIs and frameworks that helped plugins developers… Then we’d have some more organization.

Also, in exemple, instead of having 5 plugins that do stuff somehow related, these 5 developers should work together on a unique, high quality plugin, with all their contributed codes. Doing so, instead of minor and not so evident plugins, this unique plugin would have much more evidence, its own website and tac, donations, code contributions, and even a forum where users could help each other.

But try to suggest that to a plugin author and see what he’ll answer…

I would love to have as much knowledge about PHP and WP as I do about my career day job, but getting one PhD is enough. It would be nice if the Power People could forgive the rest of us for not having their skills (and probably putting them out of business or at least lowering their hourly rate).

How would we feel if Olympic athletes bad mouthed disabled people for not having stamina and a faster time running the mile? Probably not very good.

Since my blog needs are small, I don’t need to have high level skills, I just have to write useful content. I try to follow some of the WP community dialogue and also learn some of the skill set, but mostly I just want to be able to write content and help people with PTSD not kill themselves.

Disparaging people with few tech skills is simply mean-spirited. If a person criticizes a noob for not being a power user, then why can’t they at least include some links to tutorials that would teach the skills? It is easy to criticize. it’s work to teach. If you teach, then you actually care about the subject and its community.

Perhaps one of the Power User crowd could write a book called “PHP for WordPress.”

If this post does not apply to you then I am grateful. If it does, how about including the tutorials or maybe start writing that book?

Semper Pax, Dr. Z