WordPress plugin madness – You don't need them!

I was trying to get the correct plugin installed to do “that” thing. For over 4 hours, I skipped and tested over 50 plugins in WP to get the favorite look done, but nothing helped. Something would not look right – or I’d have to compromise somewhere.

Common sense suddenly struck as I looked up phpdoc.wordpress.org, stitched together a Template file and used a few get_posts and setup_postdata calls to do exactly what I was looking for. Damn those cheeky plugins that redo the same thing over and again but not quite much!

Specifically, I wanted to list out all my posts in (by) a particular category on a page – although I also wanted an excerpt to be printed out for each post. None of the available plugins are able to do this cleanly. Some would say – go edit the php file. Well, if I wanted to do php, why would I use a plugin? And that’s when I thought – yeah, why do I need a plugin anyway. Thus ends my tryst with plugins. I’d use them lesser and lesser, until it’s about some integration with a third tool.

2 Replies to “WordPress plugin madness – You don't need them!”

  1. Hahahaaa… That is the reality! Well, there are so many of them – most of them are either a minor modification of another one. Doing away with PHP might sound easy to you, but the pain is you need to do it everything there is a new version of WP. So be careful enough while touching the core.

    1. True, I am keeping to only defining my own templates. But with the rate of change of wordpress code, I am afraid they might change stuff so fast that my templates may become unusable too. I’ll be careful before upgrading now and really backup. ;)

      Edit 1: So I post this comment and I see that it doesn’t show up as a reply. I go back and check the comments under post; nope, not there. And then I see: “Akismet has marked one comment as ‘spam'”! Good job Akismet; you slimy idiot!

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