5 ms·

Show HN: I Write In-Depth Wordpress Plugin Reviews

104 points by shash7 9y ago

shash7 9y ago
Hey folks I write in-depth Wordpress Plugin reviews. So if you're on the ledge about buying or installing a particular plugin you can check out my reviews. I keep this in mind while reviewing plugins: - Functionality of the plugin - Any security issue the plugin has - Support offered by the devs as well as the pricing - Any weird gotchas or unexpected behavior with other plugins Recently I posted an in-depth review of Carbon Fields and ACF. Let me know what you think about it!
- climber604 9y ago
  I'm quite proud of the plugin I wrote so I'm going to plug it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/revisionize/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/revisionize/
  - shash7 9y ago
    Looks good bro. You getting feedback from paid users?
- sleavey 9y ago
  The TinyMCE review, at least, has a bunch of spelling mistakes and duplicate words / broken sentences. Would be worth doing a once-over of the article.
  - shash7 9y ago
    Yeah I kinda pushed it today. Gonna spellcheck it tonight.
- GoToRO 9y ago
  This is great. What we really need is a curated list of good plugins.
scarecrowbob 9y ago
Hey, I like your idea. I'm not accepting clients, so this is not a plug, I'm just saying this to frame where I am coming from. I do audits and WordPress code reviews for folks like junior college districts and largish content marketing sites; these range from load-testing and auditing the servers to examining the code quality of custom plugins and themes. I also do a lot of one-off and custom WP work for similar levels of clients. Here's one element that you might find useful that I wasn't seeing in your reviews and that I don't see in a lot of reviews (because it's a pain in the butt to do the work to uncover): looking at the hooks/ expandability of the plugin. Like, you might audit the actual code quality and see how easy you think it might be to accomplish various customizations without, say, forking the plug. I'm always surprised at the variability on this point among various plugins. Some plugins are filtering all kinds of things, some don't filter much at all. Some have really flexible and easy to modify CPTs, some have a ton of functionality hard coded. Some things have really baroque systems that would be easy to expand, but they are written using some crazy complicated architecture and you have to do hours of reading code to understand what you'd want to do. A second thing that you might look at is the nature of "paid-ness" of the plugins. There is one business listing plugin (which I hate writing extensions for) that basically breaks the site if you don't re-up the subscription every year. There are other plugins that play nice-- you buy them once, and they work everywhere just fine and if they release a new major version you can buy it again. I don't like paid-for commercial stuff in GPL, but that's at least reasonable. What isn't reasonable are licensing schemes that do things like break local/staging/test/prod environments because the license is tied to some crazy thing like the URL. Anyhow, it's a pretty site, so I wish you well.
- shash7 9y ago
  Hey thanks for the writeup! Code review/table structure, etc are highly requested featured right now. I'm working on it but I don't want to rush and put something wrong out there. I don't understand your second point. Can you point me to the plugin which keeps breaking after the license expires.
  - ddebernardy 9y ago
    Not the OP, but what he likely means is some plugins calling home using a unique url tied to the licence, that can then be removed to revoke the ability to use the plugin.
themodelplumber 9y ago
Good on you for this contribution. Plugins can be a liability in so many ways. I remember almost a decade ago, a favorite plugin of my clients' was sold by the original dev to a third party. From that day on the quality of support and release schedule both took a dive, and soon after we started receiving telecommunications product spam from the new vendor. Like telephony solutions, which were completely unrelated to the plugin. After having spent hundreds of hours customizing that plugin, this was a devastating experience. I'm still leery of plugins and rarely install anything that could leave me stranded if it went unsupported one day.
- shash7 9y ago
  Yeah they can be downright dangerous. Some time ago, hackers got access to a plugin on wordpress.org and injected it with malicious code. Nobody even knew until Sucuri released a blog post about it. At wpplugincheck we verify the plugin is clean by checking for any issues at wpvulndb. I'm also looking at automating plugin code testing.
CM30 9y ago
Looks good for the most part. That said, I do feel like you should maybe go into a bit more depth about certain things, like how quick/detailed support responses are (if possible), the quality of the code itself, the viability of the pricing schemes, etc. But that's just my opinion here.
- shash7 9y ago
  I agree. These reviews were pretty light on content few months ago but they are constantly being updated. In fact I just updated Updraft's review today based on a user's feedback. Reviewing the quality of code is not exactly straightforward. Right now, I'm looking at how to address code review/table structure/api access of plugins while keeping the review concise enough so that non-techy Wordpress users can understand.
  - CM30 9y ago
    Maybe another page for the tech side, so those interested can read it and those aren't can skip it? If that fails, a (hidden by default) box with the content could work. Have it open when they click some button or what not.
sleavey 9y ago
Cool site! I recently made a plugin to turn WordPress into an academic labbook and found that the ecosystem is so, so full of absolute rubbish. If a plugin isn't immediately and continuously bugging you to buy the pro version, it's modifying core WordPress look and feel (either admin or public facing pages, or both) in such a fundamental way that it is an eyesore. No, I don't want your crappy little plugin with grammar and spelling mistakes to have its own top level menu on the admin dashboard. In my plugin therefore tried to do things properly and avoid changing too much core functionality. It would be great if your site could review plugins on that sort of criteria. My plugin (basically finished but not fully tested)) for anyone that's interested: https://github.com/SeanDS/alp https://github.com/SeanDS/alp
freshyill 9y ago
This is great. One piece of feedback, about the reviews themselves: Every time you use parentheses, there’s no space between the preceding word and the opening paren(like this). I only read through the ACF review, but I saw it a number of times there.
- shash7 9y ago
  Hmm I though there's no space traditionally. I'll check it out.
  - aorth 9y ago
    I think the custom is different depending on where you're from. I'm American and I have always used a space between the text and the opening paren. On that note, another American thing is to put two spaces after a period (something I've long stopped doing).
    - freshyill 9y ago
      I think two spaces after a period is more of a typewriter bad habit than American thing. Back when you had a single monospace typeface, I think it just made things more legible. People who learned it then passed it on to generations who never used a typewriter.
      - xyclos 9y ago
        anecdotal, but when I was in grade school (in the US) I was taught that it was a MLA rule to use two spaces after a period. I had teachers that deducted points from a paper if the extra spaces were missing.
  - wingerlang 9y ago
    Are you from India? I checked out your LinkedIn (HN profile > Website > LinkedIn) Apparently there are others who have asked the same https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-Indians-not-use-spaces-properly-around-punctuation-marks https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-Indians-not-use-spaces-pro... For the link, I don't use WP myself but if I ever do I'll find this post again.
phoenix24 9y ago
stupid question but, what is the business model with plugin reviews?
- shash7 9y ago
  Nothing stupid about it. The plan is to support the business with affiliate links to the plugins and get some sponsorship on the side.
africasiaeuro 9y ago
Love your review comment on 'Hello Dolly'; consider this: My first action - after installing WP - getting rid of it.
sareiodata 9y ago
Plugin developer here. Just had a look at some of the review... they are in no way in-depth. I would call them plugin descriptions at best, but not reviews. Each of the bigger plugins like Gravity Forms or Advanced Custom Fields has so much functionality under the hood that I feel you're not even touching the surface. Again, good and possibly useful description of each plugin, but they are not in-depth reviews.
mathattack 9y ago
Very useful. It may help to be explicit about relationships with the makers. Something like a blanket statement of “I don’t get paid for writing reviews and don’t accet sponsorships” or “I review on request if the makers but don’t charge them for it.” It could also help to know the spread. Why % are 4 stars? 5?
- shash7 9y ago
  Yeah that's true. I'm redesigning the site currently and all these notices will be in new site.
austinhutch 9y ago
If you're anything like me this may have been inspired by some plugins you absolutely hate. My advice would be to get a couple of 1 star reviews up, knowing which to avoid is maybe more powerful than the plugins to install! Keep up the good work :)
- shash7 9y ago
  Yeah true. I'm gonna review Visual Composer in the near future :P

104 points by shash7 9y ago

Hey folks I write in-depth Wordpress Plugin reviews. So if you're on the ledge about buying or installing a particular plugin you can check out my reviews. I keep this in mind while reviewing plugins: - Functionality of the plugin - Any security issue the plugin has - Support offered by the devs as well as the pricing - Any weird gotchas or unexpected behavior with other plugins Recently I posted an in-depth review of Carbon Fields and ACF. Let me know what you think about it!

climber604 9y ago
I'm quite proud of the plugin I wrote so I'm going to plug it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/revisionize/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/revisionize/
- shash7 9y ago
  Looks good bro. You getting feedback from paid users?
sleavey 9y ago
The TinyMCE review, at least, has a bunch of spelling mistakes and duplicate words / broken sentences. Would be worth doing a once-over of the article.
- shash7 9y ago
  Yeah I kinda pushed it today. Gonna spellcheck it tonight.
GoToRO 9y ago
This is great. What we really need is a curated list of good plugins.

scarecrowbob 9y ago

Hey, I like your idea. I'm not accepting clients, so this is not a plug, I'm just saying this to frame where I am coming from. I do audits and WordPress code reviews for folks like junior college districts and largish content marketing sites; these range from load-testing and auditing the servers to examining the code quality of custom plugins and themes. I also do a lot of one-off and custom WP work for similar levels of clients. Here's one element that you might find useful that I wasn't seeing in your reviews and that I don't see in a lot of reviews (because it's a pain in the butt to do the work to uncover): looking at the hooks/ expandability of the plugin. Like, you might audit the actual code quality and see how easy you think it might be to accomplish various customizations without, say, forking the plug. I'm always surprised at the variability on this point among various plugins. Some plugins are filtering all kinds of things, some don't filter much at all. Some have really flexible and easy to modify CPTs, some have a ton of functionality hard coded. Some things have really baroque systems that would be easy to expand, but they are written using some crazy complicated architecture and you have to do hours of reading code to understand what you'd want to do. A second thing that you might look at is the nature of "paid-ness" of the plugins. There is one business listing plugin (which I hate writing extensions for) that basically breaks the site if you don't re-up the subscription every year. There are other plugins that play nice-- you buy them once, and they work everywhere just fine and if they release a new major version you can buy it again. I don't like paid-for commercial stuff in GPL, but that's at least reasonable. What isn't reasonable are licensing schemes that do things like break local/staging/test/prod environments because the license is tied to some crazy thing like the URL. Anyhow, it's a pretty site, so I wish you well.

shash7 9y ago
Hey thanks for the writeup! Code review/table structure, etc are highly requested featured right now. I'm working on it but I don't want to rush and put something wrong out there. I don't understand your second point. Can you point me to the plugin which keeps breaking after the license expires.
- ddebernardy 9y ago
  Not the OP, but what he likely means is some plugins calling home using a unique url tied to the licence, that can then be removed to revoke the ability to use the plugin.

themodelplumber 9y ago

Good on you for this contribution. Plugins can be a liability in so many ways. I remember almost a decade ago, a favorite plugin of my clients' was sold by the original dev to a third party. From that day on the quality of support and release schedule both took a dive, and soon after we started receiving telecommunications product spam from the new vendor. Like telephony solutions, which were completely unrelated to the plugin. After having spent hundreds of hours customizing that plugin, this was a devastating experience. I'm still leery of plugins and rarely install anything that could leave me stranded if it went unsupported one day.

shash7 9y ago
Yeah they can be downright dangerous. Some time ago, hackers got access to a plugin on wordpress.org and injected it with malicious code. Nobody even knew until Sucuri released a blog post about it. At wpplugincheck we verify the plugin is clean by checking for any issues at wpvulndb. I'm also looking at automating plugin code testing.

CM30 9y ago

Looks good for the most part. That said, I do feel like you should maybe go into a bit more depth about certain things, like how quick/detailed support responses are (if possible), the quality of the code itself, the viability of the pricing schemes, etc. But that's just my opinion here.

shash7 9y ago
I agree. These reviews were pretty light on content few months ago but they are constantly being updated. In fact I just updated Updraft's review today based on a user's feedback. Reviewing the quality of code is not exactly straightforward. Right now, I'm looking at how to address code review/table structure/api access of plugins while keeping the review concise enough so that non-techy Wordpress users can understand.
- CM30 9y ago
  Maybe another page for the tech side, so those interested can read it and those aren't can skip it? If that fails, a (hidden by default) box with the content could work. Have it open when they click some button or what not.

sleavey 9y ago

Cool site! I recently made a plugin to turn WordPress into an academic labbook and found that the ecosystem is so, so full of absolute rubbish. If a plugin isn't immediately and continuously bugging you to buy the pro version, it's modifying core WordPress look and feel (either admin or public facing pages, or both) in such a fundamental way that it is an eyesore. No, I don't want your crappy little plugin with grammar and spelling mistakes to have its own top level menu on the admin dashboard. In my plugin therefore tried to do things properly and avoid changing too much core functionality. It would be great if your site could review plugins on that sort of criteria. My plugin (basically finished but not fully tested)) for anyone that's interested: https://github.com/SeanDS/alp https://github.com/SeanDS/alp

freshyill 9y ago

This is great. One piece of feedback, about the reviews themselves: Every time you use parentheses, there’s no space between the preceding word and the opening paren(like this). I only read through the ACF review, but I saw it a number of times there.

shash7 9y ago
Hmm I though there's no space traditionally. I'll check it out.
- aorth 9y ago
  I think the custom is different depending on where you're from. I'm American and I have always used a space between the text and the opening paren. On that note, another American thing is to put two spaces after a period (something I've long stopped doing).
  - freshyill 9y ago
    I think two spaces after a period is more of a typewriter bad habit than American thing. Back when you had a single monospace typeface, I think it just made things more legible. People who learned it then passed it on to generations who never used a typewriter.
    - xyclos 9y ago
      anecdotal, but when I was in grade school (in the US) I was taught that it was a MLA rule to use two spaces after a period. I had teachers that deducted points from a paper if the extra spaces were missing.
- wingerlang 9y ago
  Are you from India? I checked out your LinkedIn (HN profile > Website > LinkedIn) Apparently there are others who have asked the same https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-Indians-not-use-spaces-properly-around-punctuation-marks https://www.quora.com/Why-do-many-Indians-not-use-spaces-pro... For the link, I don't use WP myself but if I ever do I'll find this post again.

phoenix24 9y ago

stupid question but, what is the business model with plugin reviews?

shash7 9y ago
Nothing stupid about it. The plan is to support the business with affiliate links to the plugins and get some sponsorship on the side.

africasiaeuro 9y ago

Love your review comment on 'Hello Dolly'; consider this: My first action - after installing WP - getting rid of it.

sareiodata 9y ago

Plugin developer here. Just had a look at some of the review... they are in no way in-depth. I would call them plugin descriptions at best, but not reviews. Each of the bigger plugins like Gravity Forms or Advanced Custom Fields has so much functionality under the hood that I feel you're not even touching the surface. Again, good and possibly useful description of each plugin, but they are not in-depth reviews.

mathattack 9y ago

Very useful. It may help to be explicit about relationships with the makers. Something like a blanket statement of “I don’t get paid for writing reviews and don’t accet sponsorships” or “I review on request if the makers but don’t charge them for it.” It could also help to know the spread. Why % are 4 stars? 5?

shash7 9y ago
Yeah that's true. I'm redesigning the site currently and all these notices will be in new site.

austinhutch 9y ago

If you're anything like me this may have been inspired by some plugins you absolutely hate. My advice would be to get a couple of 1 star reviews up, knowing which to avoid is maybe more powerful than the plugins to install! Keep up the good work :)

shash7 9y ago
Yeah true. I'm gonna review Visual Composer in the near future :P