I do it to make my life easier. If I think of something that would make WordPress easier for myself, I write up the code to do so. And sinse I have the code, and it made my life easier, I figure why not give it to everyone else to make their life easier.
And when someone leaves a comment that the plugin helped them out, it makes all the time I spent writing it worth while. Whereas plugins that don’t get a lot of comments, I tend to not develop/support anymore. A little thanks goes a long way. 🙂
So my motivation is a little selfish I guess, but “necessity is the mother of all invention”.
——————————
WordPress
http://wordpress.org/
you sign’em, we axe ’em
I like the sense of satisfaction that a person who is using my plugins feel happy. If they are happy so am I. Some very generous even donated to me. Thus I feel ‘recognised’ in the WP community. And that motivated me a lot in creating/improving on my plugins. But of course now I have about 3 hours of free time daily to do programming till my University stars in 7th august 2006.
From 10+ hits to your site to at least 500 hits on your site is also another motivation factor =)
I’m all over the place on this topic, so let me just shoot out some points on what motivates me:
1. I create plugins because I have the skill, knowledge, and time to do so.
2. I like the WordPress platform (for the most part), and the community that has grown up around it.
3. There is definitely the “helping others because I enjoy it” mentality as GamerZ mentions, but I also get something out of it as an intellectual and technical pursuit as well. I like to learn, to educate myself in many areas. This is one of them.
4. There is an egoistic side to this, in that a plugin gaining any sort of broad use or popularity can add to and enhance ones own. The limelight can be a big draw. Still, it’s certainly not why I wrote my first plugin, and probably won’t be why I’ll write my next. See points above for that.
5. Your question could also be directed towards those who spend time developing WordPress itself, or provide support here in the forums, or work on the documentation. I don’t consider these to be any different. We’re all doing a little something to make WordPress better. And that’s my final point.
I’ve written a plugin as I needed some enhanced functionality in WP in a way other plugins I found didn’t do.
So I started reading the developer docs, immediately fell in love with the WordPress API and saw that it is very easy to make a plugin stable and well-designed. So I could make it public.
Next I got dozens of mails from people who used the plugin and had problems with installing, questions, feature-requests and so on. Most things could be solved with some few lines of code.
I recruited some of the people as beta-testers. So I hold contact to some really nice persons all around the world. This social aspect is very important to me. I wouldn’t develop the plugin any further if there was no feedback, I think.
I have done it both because there is a need for X function, and because I wanted to learn PHP.
Please publish your final paper!
Please publish your final paper!
to the OP: and don’t forget: WP is a very nice publishing platform 🙂
I have to do a project on “computer users” and was thinking of doing the wordpress community also. hmm..
