I Love You, Plugin People!

Plugins are what make WordPress the undisputed king of blogging platforms.

Not to get too weird, but I feel like trying to really explain what’s so amazing about the universe of WordPress plugins is like a believer trying to explain what God is, or a parent trying to explain what it feels like to have children…or, to balance things out (and to use an example I can personally identify with), it’s like trying to explain what it’s like to be at Burning Man.

You can describe various aspects of the amazing thing, you can give examples of the amazing thing, you can try and illustrate the amazing thing…but until the person actually experiences the amazing thing for his or herself, they just aren’t going to truly understand. To really understand it, you have to feel it happening to you.

That’s what it’s like with WordPress plugins. It’s like giving birth to God at Burning Man.

OK, fine, I said I wasn’t going to get too weird, so I’ll step back from that claim, but still…the universe of WP plugins is truly mind-boggling and awe-inspiring.

Like I said, I could give examples, but examples alone wouldn’t give you the whole picture. Even the official WordPress Plugins repository is but a slice of the full pie.

In fact, I would submit that there is no way to even get the full big picture with WP plugins, which is one of the things that makes the topic so hard to truly cover. Just the sheer quantity of compilations of WordPress plugins is hard to get a handle on. Those are your “25 Best Plugins for Photoblogging [etc.]”-type collections, which can be found on Google by searching for “best wordpress plugins”, optionally adding a specific function or a niche (i.e., “real estate”, “restaurant”, “video”, “newsletter”, etc.)

Any search for WP plugins is bound to turn up unexpected (and usually pleasant) surprises. I have found some really brilliant plugins accidentally while searching for some other type of plugin, either right in the Google results, or in a compilation like I mentioned…or in the secret plugin goldmines–a.k.a., plugin authors’ home pages.

Fairly often when looking for WP plugins you will stumble onto the website of one of the independent developers of a given plugin. Then when you get there, lo and behold, that guy has a list of like 6 or maybe 20 different small and large plugins he has created, mostly to solve little problems he has wanted to solve for his own blog. His plugins may or may not be at the WP Plugins site–there are so many there, it can be a journey through the jungle finding things sometimes, so even if they are there, you might not have found your way to them there.

I get the feeling that WordPress has been requiring a little more diligence and standardization from folks who list their stuff in the official repository, and I can think of a handful of other reasons why someone might want to just keep their stuff at their own site. So some people do. And the result is that, like I said, there are these little mines of barely-discovered plugin gold just laying around the Internet, waiting for lucky prospectors to come along and yell “Eureka!”

The other result is that there really is no way to know about all the plugins that are out there. And that’s not even getting into the fact that new plugins come out literally every single day.

If I sound a little frustrated amidst my awe, it’s because I definitely can be sometimes. I’ve been wading through the sea of WP plugins since they first existed–back when you probably could have actually identified all the WordPress plugins in existence. And it’s one of those things that does not necessarily get easier from year to year. The ever-increasing vastness of the plugin pool means that for one person to cover the whole thing requires a lot of swimming around. And ironically, having more plugins in every category has not really made things easier, simply because there are more to sort through  in order to find out which one’s specific features are the right fit for your situation.

But despite the difficulty of obtaining full knowledge of (and thus, truly full usage of) the ridiculously vast universe of WP plugins, I love, love, love, love, love LOVE WordPress plugin developers.

It’s because of them I can sit in a meeting with a client in almost any industry and when they say, “We need the site to …[WHATEVER]”, I can be like, “Yeah, there’s a way to do that. I know of a couple plugins, and there are probably a few more if those don’t quite fit.” And on to the next feature. “Yup, there’s a really good plugin for that.” Next feature. “Oh yeah, we actually include that in all the sites. It’s one of the core plugins we use.”

You need a newsletter? Check. A photo gallery? Check. Image slideshow? Check. Stock ticker? Check. Reverse the post order? Check. Event calendar? Check. Social media thingy? Yup. Invoicing tool? Yes. Business directory? Sure. Online community? Yes. Web analytics? SEO? Popular Posts? Polls? Check, check, and check. And yes.

And on and on…and again, that tiny list really misses the point, because the real moments of plugin magic come not when a client says “we need this” and you go “sure”; the best plugin joy comes when you stumble onto a plugin that fits into what the client wants to do in a way neither of you had thought of.

That’s when you get the “plugin tingle”. When someone else’s brilliant little tool, that they just left lying there for you, brings you a new feature that you didn’t even realize you could have–making your site into something you didn’t realize it could be.

When that happens to you (if it hasn’t already) you’ll probably have a strangely uncomfortable feeling of unrequited gratitude. You’ll want to bow and give thanks, not just to the one developer who happened to be your benefactor then, but to the whole amazing ecosystem that allowed him or her to grow, and to all the living things that grow in there.

And by living things, I mean of course the plugin people, to whom this post is dedicated.

I love you, Plugin People. Thank you so much!

Who are some of your favorite plugin people? Give props (and links) in the comments!