Category: wordpress plugins

Why do WordPress plugins stop being maintained? I guess because of the freeloaders*

*freeloader – someone that uses a free thing without giving back in any way

The problem with getting a software for free, just based on its price, is that the cost of switching to something else is high. Most likely a new software, even if it does exactly the same thing, requires to at least be configured as its DB/configuration files are not compatible with other software and there is no migration utility, and then of course you need to test it to make sure you have duplicated everything correctly.

In a very simplistic way a decision to use a specific software is kind of getting married with the software developer. You might be getting married because that is the easiest way to have available sex, or to get rid of social pressure, but after some time you start to develop dependency on your partner and gain common assets that are hard to divide (kids, house, etc). You might be flirting with some other people but usually the cost of divorce is just too high.
Stopping using a software is like divorcing the developer, the cost is usually high.

Since you don’t want to get to a point were a divorce is the only way forward in a relationship, you are being attentive to your partner because everyone that passed puberty knows that in the real life in order to receive you have also to give.
WordPress users apparently have not passed puberty yet.

The attitude projected by users to the plugin authors is one of entitlement.  Users want the plugins free, want them bug free, want them to perfectly match their own unique needs, want their support questions to be answered in a timely manner and want them to be maintained for ever, stay compatible with every new WordPress version.
The first item – “free”, is in real life contradictory to all the others.

Some people think by mistake that plugin developers can eat their ego, but unfortunately they also need some bread from time to time. 5 starring a plugin is nice but doesn’t help to bring bread to the table therefor forcing plugin developer to look for some real day job that doesn’t leave them any will and energy to spend on maintaining their plugins.

Login LockDown plugin is compatible only up to 4.0.8 and was not updated in a year. It has 200k active users. If every one of them paid one time only a fee of 1$, the developer could have spent 2-3 years doing nothing else but caring to the users of the plugins.

Limit Login Attempts is compatible up to 3.3.2, has not been updated in 3 years but still have more then 1M active users. Now just imagine how much time the developer could have devoted to the plugin if each user donated 1$ to him.

I actually got curious about the later plugin and tried to “track down” its developer. From what I saw on his twitter stream he is doing very well. Obviously he neglects the plugin out of his free will, I guess it is because he can’t eat the 5 star reviews.

People are cheap (news at eleven), me included, but giving some monetary incentive to the developer to keep developing their plugins is good for the users.

In a way this is not only a problem of people being cheap, it is also a problem of the repository for not promoting donations to actively used plugins.

The end result is that the plugins that are in the repository are more of a demo for the real plugin for which you actually have to pay. This is bad because not all the developers that do this have the ability (or will) to run their own plugin update service, leaving the users with no notification about security updates.

Maybe donations of 1$ each are not practical, maybe what is needed is some way in which the repository (or more accurately, the WordPress foundation) sponsor the maintenance of high profile plugins.

 

Using Jetpack reduces the raw site performance by up to 20%

It is obvious that the jetpack plugin has a bloated code since no one is likely to use all of its modules,  but the interesting question is what is the actual impact of the bloat on the site’s performance.

According to tests done by [art of the jetpack team itself, having jetpack active, without even doing anything will delay the time to first byte (TTFB) by about 70 miliseconds taking 470ms instead of about 400ms.

The point here is not the numbers themselves, as it is not very clear what is the setup of the test, but the fact that it is something that actually going to be noticeable, something that actually requires more server resources.

I assume that the problem is with the time it takes for the PHP interpreter to read and interpret the jetpack source files. People that host on VPS can select a host with faster disk access (SSD), have better control of file caching done in memory by the OS, and cache the interpreted code, can and should optimize PHP interpreting aspects. People on shared hosting are just out of luck.

And the usual caveats regarding any performance related discussion apply – if you have most of your pages served from a cache then the impact performance degradation in generating one page is probably much less important to you.

The only use case for using wpml plugin for multi lingual wordpress sites is when you need control of the translation process

The CEO of OnTheGoSystems, the company behind the multilingual wordpress translation plugin WPML, gave a presentation in wordcamp jerusalem 2013.

The presentation started by showing leading Israeli site which have great content in hebrew but are much less impresive or even plain bad in english or russian.

For the english example he used the leading israeli news portal ynet.co.il which has full content in hebrew and a simpler site in english. For the russian example he used the site of the airline arkia in hebrew and their russian site.

I wasn’t the only one that were underwhelemed by those examples for “poorly translated” sites. Ynet is mainly about israeli news so why would they even bother with an english site? tourists or buisnessman located in israel might want to know about the major political/buisness/cultural events but are they really interested in the israeli equivalent of “american idol”? Same goes for arkia, their main costumers are israeli and whatever service they give to russian speakers is related to israel  (the phone numbers in the site are local israeli numbers), and how many russian speaking israeli are there that can’t use the hebrew or the english site?

In ideal world all content would have been translated in to all languages, but in the real world translation cost money and there is no point in spending money for translating into languages from which you don’t make money. It is never enough to translate the site only when it is launched, and you always need to keep spending time and money for translating every new content.

And if the reason for not having full translation to all the languages is money related conscious decision, then why would you even start considering a solution which has the basic assumption that all content should be translated? Better to just set up a site per language and manage the translation according to the amount of effort you decided to dedicate to that language.

The presentation highlighted something that WPML seems to do well, it gives you an up to date status of the translation and makes it easy to see what parts of the site are translated and what are not. This is something you can’t automatically achieve when each language has its own site. For sites that have to have reasonable up to date content in several languages (even if not all of the content) it might be a valid solution.

Simple google authorship and avatar plugin

Provides an easy to use interface for site authors to claim google authorship, and use their google profile picture as an avatar.

Main features

  • Users authenticate their google accounts via Oauth protocol and get the required info using the appropriate google API calls.
  • Inserts a <link href=”User’s G+ profile URL” rel=”author”> into the head part of the HTML for any content type created by the user. The existence of the link lets google know that the user is the author of the content and display his picture next to search results.
  • Use the users google profile picture as avatar image in comments and admin

Back story

User authentication via the Oauth protocol eliminates the need for the user to find out what is his google profile URL, and copy&paste it without mistake. An already registered application is used as a proxy for authentication and using the API, and no extra work is involved. For the user, authentication, and gathering the required info, is just one click away.

Once authenticated, anyone who can edit the user’s profile can set it to show or hide authorship and use google picture as avatar.

Network considerations

The plugin will work for any sub site in the network for which it was activated (or if the plugin is network activated).

Any change the user will make to its profile will impact all the sites in the netwrok in which the user had posted or commented.

Limitations

User still needs to aadd the site to his G+ profile “contributor to”  or “profile” links in order for the google authorship to work.
Only the user can authenticate himself, therefor an admin can not set authorship or avatar instead of the user.
In network usage, sub sites admins can’t edit other users profile therefor they will not have any control and only the super admin will be able to change the settings.

Download it!

Installation/Usage instructions

  1. Follow the usual procedure of installing and activating a plugin
  2. Go to your profile click the “get info” link under the “google profile” section
  3. You will be asked to authenticate yourself to google for a “Identify google user for WordPress” app
  4. Once authenticated you should be redirected back to your profile page and see your google profile image displayed at the \”google profile\” section
  5. Don’t forget to edit the “contributor to” URLs in your google profile to include the site
  6. Ask all authors which are interested in getting authorship to do steps 2-5.

Control XML-RPC publishing wordpress plugin

With WordPress version 3.5 remote publishing via XML-RPC became permanently active. This plugin simulates the functionality in versions 3.4 and before. Once active, XML-RPC functioning is disabled, and it can be enabled or disabled again in the “Settings” >> “Writing” admin page.

Download from repository

If you find this plugin usefull, don’t forget to donate

I will be very surprised if I will receive enough donations to cover the cost of the effort in designing, coding testing and supporting this plugin.but it is a nice sign of appreciation for my work.

Trash emptier wordpress plugin

The trash was introduced in wordpress version 2.9, and the operations of deleting posts (all types of post types) and comments was replaced by sending them to the trash. Actual deletion from the DB is done through trash management which is separate for each post type and comments. In addition an automatic process empties everyday all trashed items which where in the trash from more then 30 day. read more about the trash feature in the codex.

The plugin has two function

  • Provides a way to conctol the maximal amount of time an item will be kept in the trash before being deleted as an alternative to defining the EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS constant in your wp-config.php file. You can have the automatic trash empty performed faster, or set such a riciculously long interval that essently makes emptying the trash a puerly manuall operation.
  • Manually empty item from the trash based the time they been there.

Installation

  1. Download it from the repository
  2. Using your favourit FTP software upload the emptytrash folder into your site /wp-content/plugins directory
  3. go to the plugin management page and activate.

Usage

  • To Manually empty the trash go to the “Tools” >> “Trash emptier” menu
  • To configure the automatic emptying interval go to “Options” >> “Trash emptier”  menu

If you find this plugin usefull, don’t forget to donate

I will be very surprised if I will receive enough donations to cover the cost of the effort in designing, coding testing and supporting this plugin.but it is a nice sign of appreciation for my work.