About Greg’s WordPress Plugins
I have no interest in WordPress plugins for their own sake. I don’t sell WordPress services, and I most certainly do not live, eat or breathe WordPress. But if I want something to work a little differently on one of my sites that uses WordPress, sometimes I write a plugin. Very occasionally, I release them into the wild.
Plugins and Me
Yep, it’s true: I really have no interest in WordPress plugins. I get that some people do, and for those who find joy in coding up the latest and greatest patch, tweak, or entire framework, I say: more power to you!
For my part, I’m interested in writing a plugin for one reason and for one reason only: as a way of helping me get something else done. If I wouldn’t want to use it myself — if I don’t feel a pressing need to use it for a particular project — then I don’t write it. At last count, I’ve written around 40 or 50 plugins, most of which see daily use on my own sites, but I’ve released less than 10% of those — a grand total of 4.
Why so few?
Because for the most part, the plugins I write address a fairly specific functional requirement that arises in a fairly narrow and well-defined set of environmental circumstances. In other words, they do something specific for me in the situations where I need them. But the broader community’s needs and usage patterns are usually far, far more broad than my own.
Every now and then, the usage patterns and needs of at least a subset of the broader community’s turn out to match up fairly well with my own — and it’s on those occasions that I’ll think about releasing one of the plugins for other people to use.
I don’t think it’s just me. It’s actually fairly typical: lots of developers out there write lots of WordPress plugins which actually never see the public light of day.
So this site is here specifically as an information hub just for that small set of plugins which I’ve actually released. I used to post about the plugins over in the Psychology, Philosophy and Real Life blog at CounsellingResource.com, but I’ve since moved the old posts on WordPress topics here to GregsPlugins.com. I hope you’ll find it useful!
As for my background with WordPress, I began using (and developing for) WordPress in 2004, with version 1.2. In fact, a few of my plugins — including Greg’s High Performance SEO — actually include snippets of code from way back then. Can you tell? (Ha! Looking at some of my plugins is like looking into the past. I sure don’t write code like that any more…) I’ve been running several of my sites or sections of sites on WordPress for years and have converted several old static sites to the platform.
Although WordPress handles thousands of pages of content across several of my sites, even more content is handled by underlying CMS engines of my own creation, tapping into comparatively large MySQL databases.
More About Me
You can read about my more relevant (to me!) background here:
- Meet the Publisher (mental health focus) — CounsellingResource.com
- Trivia, Minutiae and Funky Facts — CounsellingResource.com
- About me at Google+
