re support – a good question.
It would be helpful to have a field on the plugin pages so authors could indicate whether they are actively supporting their plug-ins or not.
There’s a fantastic range of plugins available and so many people giving their time to develop them, but the process of sorting the no-longer-supported ones from the actively supported ones is one of the most time consuming aspects of finding a suitable plugin.
This is a big problem with all of these free open source projects like Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc.. However, the upside of it is, so much of it is free, and you can’t argue with that.
The best way to tell if software is being maintained or not is to look at the last update date right in the right column on the plugin page, as well as its WordPress compatibility level. Also check and see if the maintainer is answering recent issues or not either here or on their own supporting Web site. it’s worth taking the time to check out their site if they have one, especially if the last update if more than 6 mos old.
If you’re going on a year since the last update, and there have been numerous WordPress updates in the meantime like in the past year, you can pretty much bet the plugin is not being upkept and it might not work or at least have some issues — or will soon enough. I installed this Tniy MCE pluging a few months ago, and it worked ( if buggily), and now with upgrades, it has stopped working altogether.
Anyways, I am now checking out WP Super Edit, which appears to have better features and was updated a week ago.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-edit/
Also check out the CK Editor based on FCK editor, an excellent editor I use on some Drupal sites and elsewhere.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ckeditor-for-wordpress/
🙂
Cheers Sparkyweb – I’m with you on the open source thing and I assess plugins pretty much as you lay out there.
I guess in the process it would be nice to have an extra search filter here and there to refine the search process earlier on.
But I’m pretty much awe-struck at the quality of many plugins and the amount of time developers have committed to them. Amazing stuff.
Thanks for those links – I’ll give super edit a try. I was also searching for some way to customise the HTML editor and found this help article:
http://www.shoutmeloud.com/how-to-add-custom-buttons-to-wordpress-editor.html
Thanks sparkyweb for the suggestion to try WP Super Edit. One thing that really helps is when folks take the time to suggest replacement plugins for ones that are no longer supported!
Yes, it is being supported. It wasn’t updated for WP 3.0.x as it didn’t need an update, but the new version with support for WP 3.1 is already out.
