The time had come for WordPress plugins to be done the right way, focus on the usability and long term maintainability for the owner of the site instead of cramming as many buzzwords as possible in hope that it will increase the marketability of the plugin and as a side effect force people into buying a support contract.
Who am i?
My name is Mark Kaplun, I have a BA in computer science from the Tel-Aviv university and I worked for a long time in the telecommunication industry both as an embedded software developer and on network management products.
One happy day I decided to open a blog for myself and decided to prefer WordPress over Moveable Type, that was in the happy days of 2.0.4 version. Very quickly I started to tinker with WordPress and publish plugins for it. And when I quit my last formal day job I decided to do a career shift and became a freelance focusing on WordPress related development.
Since then I have built many sites, even hosted some of them on my own VPS, and created all kinds of plugins for all kinds of companies.
And this long description is here to indicate that when I say that I know how software should be developed and maintained, and I know what practical problems users face with wordpress plugins, I do really know out of my own experience.
Want to read more of my tech related rants?, you are welcome to my blog.
Need some more prof that I actually know what I do? just head on to my profile on the wordpress stackexchange.
So what is unique about the plugins in this shop?
The plugins are designed with the typical site admin in mind. The typical site admin is far from being a software developer, or a web server expert, but what he does know is how to use WordPress and how to find the components (themes, plugins, even some small coding when needed) that will make the site work as the client requires.
What is the biggest fear of the admin? An upgrade. An experienced admin most likely had at least one site in which a core or theme or plugin upgrade ruined the site in some way. The admin knows that upgrades should be tested on a staging server before deploying any upgrade to the live one, but he can not justify the cost of “doing it right” to the client which rarely understands that there is a maintenance cost of having a web site beyond the initial cost of building it. It doesn’t help at all that many plugins have an update once every month or two.
The plugins here are designed to not ever need to be upgraded. They are focused on “do one thing, and do it well” with clear description of what they do, small and well defined scope, and no ambition at all to add new feature as time goes by.
The welcome side effect is that the plugins tend to be small and easy to audit both for security and possible side effects, and when needed even debugged and adjusted if your own specific needs do not exactly meet what the plugin does.
What about support?
My believe is that it is a bad sign when a software requires a support contract. When your revenue depends on support contracts you have less incentive to produce a bug free software and more incentive to add needless features just to make it seem like the support was worth the money.
Support also drives prices up, because the human time required to give a proper response is expensive, and if the software was done right then most people do not need the support and basically pay for the few that do need it.
My idea of support focuses on bug fixes. I guarantee to fix any bug, any deviation from how the plugin is supposed to behave, ASAP. If you need a more general support contract, just contact me.
Read more about the Support Policy