Third party plugins

Third party plugins, a quick rant about what I love/hate about them.

 When I started out creating website I had enough ideas to sink a boat but not the skill-set to implement them fully, so like any good coding student I reached out to the myriad of third party plugins. Since then I have gone from relying on them to actually wanting to avoid them at all costs.

As a colleague of mine will point out, Wordpress core is security but the main security risks are plugins, typically written with little concern for security.

Show them the love

Simply put, the ease of it all, typically you download the file, install it, maybe do some configuring and you are done! This is where the whole attraction is, simply install the plugin/add-on/extension and you are done, instant power! 

You also get updates, updates are nice but lets be honest, we now live in a world where shoddy code is released far too often with the promise that it will be patched at a later date thanks to lovely old updates.

Burn them, burn them now

The problem with third party plugins, in my opinion is, they are never built bespoke and thus do more or less that what you require them to do. Meaning you either have to modify the way your system works or modify the way the plugin work(don't you dare).

I will finish off this rant sometime but until then when downloading plugins I would advise you read through the code before activating them you might just be surprised what is behind the curtain...