The benefits of writing wordpress plugins
Here at JustSearch we love Wordpress. As a cms solution it works almost for every case and saves times, which means cheaper development. It took me a few days to fully grasp all the possibilities of Wordpress and I learn everyday new ways to do things.
This is all great but sometimes you need stuff you can’t do with the out-of-the-box install. That’s where plugins come handy. You can find all sorts of plugins and you can imagine all the plugins that don’t exist already.
How many blogs are running on wordpress nowadays? Hundreds of thousands. The plugin market is huge. And the community is very active, always looking for new fancy functionalities for their blog. You have to option when you start getting into plugin development:
- Complex plugin targeting a special part of the market. If you’ve planned the development correctly and build a plugin that will get a big demand you could sell it.
- Simple pulgins for a wide audience. If it didn’t take you to long to write it consider releasing it for free from the wordpress.org website.
Free work might sound bad to you but it doesn’t means you wont get anything in return. Start by setting up a page on your site or blog to talk about the plugin and to allow its users to comment or ask for help. Then upload it on the Wordpress plugin repository. Loads of people are checking the Wordpress site and you will certainly get decent traffic from here.
You will see in a later post that it’s easy to get started with development. We released a simple plugin called Competition Manager early this year and got good response from users. People comment on problems they have or just to say thanks which is content for the site.
The down turn is that you have to think about support. Things might go wrong at some point, you need to keep checking your plugins with new releases of Wordpress. You can’t just leave it because you might get some bad reviews.
Releasing free stuff is something you should think as a long term investment. Getting people to know the company through freebies is only the beginning of selling them your products and ultimately goes towards your online reputation.
Benoit Gilloz
Programmer, Research and Development
