Gina CMS
Gina Content Management System
Plugins, a mess
Google and Mozilla are doing away with plugins.
The plugin process
- Making your project extensible sounds like a great idea.
- Make a small core, let users extend it themselves.
- Users start to rely heavily on plugins.
- Their core can’t be updated without a plugin being brought up to specs.
- Plugin authors start to disappear, leaving orphans in their wake.
- Users reliant on orphaned plugins vacate the premises.
The plugin reality
Reality hits a project a bit too late. Plugins sounded like a good idea, but the maintenance of them is overwhelming, the volunteers give up.
What’s worse than no plugin architecture?
Plugins with no order, no quality control, a complete mess. This is detrimental to a project, it shows that they’ve lost control, and thoughts of what else are they not in control of begin to arise.
Do we really need?
Let’s go shopping.
On the left we have Store A, a handful of shelves, just what you need. On the right we have Store B, with shelf after shelf, full of stuff you may want.
If you give shoppers the choice, they will grab stuff they don’t really need.
On your left
Never been a plugin connoisseur, whether in desktop applications like Firefox, or web based apps like Textpattern. The only plugin I use in Firefox is Adblock, and the only plugin I use on new installs of Textpattern is hcg_themes. I could do without either if need be, my world is not going to stop rotating.
In the rear view
Imagine not having to deal with upgrade issues, or holding back your project because a change would break all sorts of plugins.
With HTML5, and the power of frameworks, is there anything that you really need a plugin for?
Components, shareable code snippets, now that’s what I’m talking about.
rockin'
