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I see WP Engine touted as a solution. My limited experience with a client several months ago was "hey, we're getting really big, we need better security and be

I see WP Engine touted as a solution. My limited experience with a client several months ago was "hey, we're getting really big, we need better security and better performance", they shop around, and get sold (in a literal sense) on WP Engine. Signed up, and my friend started to try to migrate things over. Oh... yeah, they don't actually support many custom plugins - you could select from some blessed ones, but the client's traffic was all using a custom theme and set of plugins. Those wouldn't run on WP Engine. I too (and many others) could make most WP hosting really secure if I got to say "you can only use these 9 plugins (or whatever the number was) and no, you can't put any custom code on the server at all". EDIT: Indeed... every moderately-sized WP project I've worked on ends up being dozens of plugins (more than 15 being average, and one recent one having about 45 active plugins). Every time I mention that to anyone I know who 'does' WP they all recoil in horror and say "I'd never even work on that - that's impossible! Why would you need that many plugins ever?!" And then I think... they don't really understand WP, or they don't understand clients. Or... yeah, it must be my problem, because I'm somehow not good enough to deliver everything a client asks for in wordpress (requirement) in the mythological "3-5 plugins" everyone tells me is their max. EDIT2: The client project referenced above was getting tens of millions visits per month, and as such the WPengine number I was told was somewhere in the region of $1500/month.

woah 10y ago
You can build whatever you want in your theme and build admin for it using custom post types. If you just trawl the bottom of the barrel for any plugin that does kind of what you need, you're going to end up with a nightmare like what you describe.
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- mgkimsal 10y ago
  "the bottom of the barrel for any plugin that does kind of what you need," Many of those "bottom of the barrel" solutions are someone else's attempt at building "whatever they wanted" with custom post types, theme options, etc.
g00gler 10y ago
What do they use so many plugins for? I took over supporting/developing a WordPress site and one of the first things I did was delete a bunch of pointless plugins. I wound up writing quite a few of my own for different tools and left some third party plugins so there are still probably 10 active between 3 sites on a multisite install. I installed Google analytics directly in the header of the custom themes on each of the multisites. There were no comments so all of the comment plugins were pointless, as were all the form plugins except for one. So, why so many plugins? Am I missing something?
- kaishiro 10y ago
  I think you're missing two things: (1) there are clients who demand administrative access, and since they pay the bills, they get it (2) maintainability. As much as I detest WordPress, and as garbage as many of the public plugins are, what would be even worse is having my team take over support for one of your sites with your custom plugins. Ramp up cost is a very real thing.
  - g00gler 10y ago
    I suppose so. I like to think my custom plugins are well written and maintainable. I attribute this to the fact that I identity as a JavaScript engineer with some classic OO tendencies (shout out to Gilfoyle). More or less I write JavaScript and Java/C# so I'm not some dipshit writing WordPress plugins w PHP/Wordpress as my first and only language and framework. The nicest plugin I've seen [code wise] is the Jasig CAS authentication plugin, and for that I had to modify it to specify the behavior I wanted (custom 500, 501 screens, don't upsert user). So, whenever an update comes around I have to either ignore it or modify the code. Honestly, I think that's even against the license since I didn't publish my changes.
    - kaishiro 10y ago
      Absolutely - and by the way, I was in no way knocking you or your code! The level of polish or viability of a custom plugin for us would just be secondary to the fact that it was custom to begin with - that's all I was trying to get across.

woah 10y ago

You can build whatever you want in your theme and build admin for it using custom post types. If you just trawl the bottom of the barrel for any plugin that does kind of what you need, you're going to end up with a nightmare like what you describe.

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mgkimsal 10y ago
"the bottom of the barrel for any plugin that does kind of what you need," Many of those "bottom of the barrel" solutions are someone else's attempt at building "whatever they wanted" with custom post types, theme options, etc.

g00gler 10y ago

What do they use so many plugins for? I took over supporting/developing a WordPress site and one of the first things I did was delete a bunch of pointless plugins. I wound up writing quite a few of my own for different tools and left some third party plugins so there are still probably 10 active between 3 sites on a multisite install. I installed Google analytics directly in the header of the custom themes on each of the multisites. There were no comments so all of the comment plugins were pointless, as were all the form plugins except for one. So, why so many plugins? Am I missing something?

kaishiro 10y ago
I think you're missing two things: (1) there are clients who demand administrative access, and since they pay the bills, they get it (2) maintainability. As much as I detest WordPress, and as garbage as many of the public plugins are, what would be even worse is having my team take over support for one of your sites with your custom plugins. Ramp up cost is a very real thing.
- g00gler 10y ago
  I suppose so. I like to think my custom plugins are well written and maintainable. I attribute this to the fact that I identity as a JavaScript engineer with some classic OO tendencies (shout out to Gilfoyle). More or less I write JavaScript and Java/C# so I'm not some dipshit writing WordPress plugins w PHP/Wordpress as my first and only language and framework. The nicest plugin I've seen [code wise] is the Jasig CAS authentication plugin, and for that I had to modify it to specify the behavior I wanted (custom 500, 501 screens, don't upsert user). So, whenever an update comes around I have to either ignore it or modify the code. Honestly, I think that's even against the license since I didn't publish my changes.
  - kaishiro 10y ago
    Absolutely - and by the way, I was in no way knocking you or your code! The level of polish or viability of a custom plugin for us would just be secondary to the fact that it was custom to begin with - that's all I was trying to get across.