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On Plugins & Community

In just getting this blog set up, I’ve noticed that over the past two years (basically since I’ve used WordPress in anything other than “huh” mode), both the quality of the WordPress code has improved, and the size plugin-writing community has sky-rocketed. The better product is good, but the force multiplier of an open-source project is its ability to create a community of hackers–not something known to be easy.

Any tool–that is, any product which people use to make other products–must be extensible, not simply because it’s a good idea (and it is), but because it’s vital to the survival of the tool’s maker. Why do Firefox users have the revolutionary zeal appropriate for storming barricades while Internet Explorer developers desperately try to create enthusiasm for their two-year-late bugfixes? Because the kid in junior high who’s using Firefox understands that he’s using a development platform, not just a browser. If he’s smart and studies his Javascript and XUL, he’ll be able to write the next Greasemonkey, or the next cool Greasemonkey script. He can tell that he’s a grunt in a gigantic, distributed corporation which isn’t quite owned, paid for, or run by anyone in particular, which means that he’s got as good a chance of making it to the top as anyone else. Do you think anyone feels like that about Internet Explorer? “Wow, a new regression. I better file a new bug report before I leave for work!”

No one feels like that about IE, unless it’s a product of Stockholm Syndrome.

Back to the matter at hand: plugins and WordPress. Ultimate Tag Warrior is an awesome plugin for associating tags with posts in WordPress, and can draw tag clouds, spectrums, and other fun things. I installed it, given my love for folksonomies and free-form data entry, and found a bug–a new post’s “Tags” field had some gobbledy-gook where there should have been nothing. Because it’s open-source, because it’s free, and because it’s created using relatively accessible technology (a web server and a text editor will do for PHP), I cracked it open to see what was broken and in a couple of minutes, had spotted the problem. “Ah, trying to get tags for a post that doesn’t exist. Yes, that will trouble a soul.” So I patched it up and posted a comment on Christine’s blog letting her know what I’d found.

Lessons to learn from this:

1. Make it extensible
2. Make it easy to get involved
3. Give people the opportunity to compete for prestige

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 17th, 2005 at 4:14am and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.