On the topic of the prevalence of freemium plugins in WordPress ecosystem: I really detest this. Given the huge effort that has gone in to WordPress itself - fr

On the topic of the prevalence of freemium plugins in WordPress ecosystem: I really detest this. Given the huge effort that has gone in to WordPress itself - freely provided to the community - it's ridiculous for small plugins - that in many cases just filter some function already provided as a hook in WordPress by the core developers - would ask for money. A few years ago I set up an online labbook for my research group using a bunch of plugins to make WordPress behave the way I wanted. I had to search really hard for plugins that didn't spam end users to "upgrade" to unlock arbitrarily disallowed features, and furthermore plugins which were well written and didn't contain silly hacks or security vulnerabilities (in the process I ended up submitting patches to a few of them to fix obvious flaws). It was even difficult to find plugins that use the proper settings page infrastructure, instead of adding their own top level menu item in the admin panel and not conforming to the WordPress core look and feel. What a mess. Somehow discouraging freemium junk from the plugin library wouldn't be a bad thing from my perspective. It would surely decrease the sheer volume of plugins available, but would undoubtedly increase the quality. Perhaps this could be achieved with some sort of rating system for the code quality, judging based on how much the code relies on WordPress APIs, properly handling unexpected input and errors, properly sanitizing user input, etc. Incidentally, I am now developing a plugin to combine the behaviour of all the plugins I previously used for the academic labbook [1] (if anyone is interested in using it, I would like to know!). In the process I've learned a lot about the WordPress code base, and have come to appreciate that it is on the whole well written - it's mainly just plugin authors that produce junk, and hope to make a quick buck off the back of the hard work of volunteers in the process. [1] https://github.com/SeanDS/alp https://github.com/SeanDS/alp