Thank you for sharing your perspective.
This plugin does not force people to buy our themes. Most of the themes that support it are not made by us. We’ve made our work with this plugin available for free to everyone (that includes “competing” theme developers) in the interest of promoting standards and data portability. This is for the benefit of churches and why the plugin is centrally hosted in the official directory.
We’ve tried to make the purpose and function of this plugin clear on the details page. If what you need is a plugin that works differently, then you are free to use a different plugin. You are also free to fork and change its purpose or to contribute a supported theme for others to benefit from. This is what WordPress is about. We simply cannot provide everything on our own (and because of this plugin, we do not have to).
I have to make a correction, and if it is the reason for your rating, I hope you will revise it. You are mistaken about this plugin not belonging in this directory. It is entirely in line with directory guidelines which is why it was approved by the plugin review team. Plugins registering post types, taxonomies and custom fields for themes to use is encouraged by members of the WordPress.org plugin and theme review teams.
If you believe they are in error, you can get in touch with them to voice your concerns about the directory.
drazon, I really do believe you should revise your rating out of respect for the work Steven has put into this. While it is true that his plugin does provide out of the box functionality that you can install and instantly use on any theme, he has put a lot of thought into this plugin.
What it does is provide the framework for churches to integrate sermons, podcasting, events, location information and events that a developer can use to build a site for a church with these key components.
He set up very easy to follow documentation for other developers to add this functionality and in many cases even sell it that theme for profit. He could have easily put this together and bundled it with his own themes and not make it available for other developers to use and would have completely justified in doing so. Instead, he put his work out there along with documentation on how to use it which is very generous and perfectly in line with the spirit of open source.
Reviews shouldn’t be used as a way to express your displeasure and share your opinion on what you think a developer should or shouldn’t do. Rather, they should be a way for you to provide feedback to the developer and other potential users on how well the plugin does or does not function. In this case, his plugin functions very well and does exactly what it claims to do, and does it very well.
Agreeing with Virtus here.
More plugins should actually emulate this one.
