The plugin writer's lament

Hi all,

I blogged about some of my frustrations with maintaining a wordpress plugin and I would love some feedback from more experienced folks.

http://www.caseyy.org/blog/the-plugin-writers-lament/

As of today, ImpactPubs has been downloaded from the WordPress plugins repository 179 times. It may also have been downloaded from GitHub. I have no absolutely no idea, however, how many live sites it has been deployed on (I know of exactly two, plus my own). I hope the number is closer to 179 than three, but I really have no idea. I mean, I’m sure that anyone who downloads it is looking for a way to display their publications on their site. And it works pretty well for that purpose.

But I keep getting emails from people who have some sort of problem with it I never foresaw, and don’t see how I could have foreseen when developing it. In the first case, the user was trying to install it on a 1and1-hosted WordPress site and found that the PHP function file_get_contents() was throwing errors. 1and1 apparently blocks certain external calls, and that particular function simply won’t work on any site hosted there. I was able to work around it with the WordPress HTTP API, but this required multiple emails between me and the blog owner (who was not a programmer).

In the second case a professional designer contacted me because she was working on a site for a major research center. Getting ImpactPubs deployed there would have been a huge step-up for visibility. Unfortunately, the sys admin had installed PHP with a critical module disabled. Solving this initiated a three-way communication between me, the designer, and the admin, and it hasn’t been resolved yet.

In these cases the user took the time to contact me with their problem, and I’m grateful. But how many people have installed it, found it didn’t work as expected, and promptly uninstalled it. I’ve tested it with a variety of authors and publication types, but I don’t see any way of dealing all the different versions of WordPress and PHP out there, to say nothing of all the ways a server can be configured. I suppose community feedback is a partial solution, but anyone installing a plugin is looking to save time by not having to code it themselves, and not to help some hapless code-monkey debug. I suppose experience might allow more problems to be anticipated, too. But I also hazard a guess that this is just an essential part of software – a computer is many parts trying to work together, sometimes unsuccessfully, and in the end, everything you write is also something you have to maintain.