Would we use WordPress if there were no plugins?

Garry Conn over at Blog Tips about Blogging asks an interesting question: Would you use WordPress if WordPress Plugins weren’t available?

Basically, the question is: would WordPress be our preferred blogging platform if there were no plugins? Or, we can ask an even more difficult question: would WordPress be worth anything without plugins?

My personal opinion is as follows: if there were no plugins, I would not necessarily use WordPress. What I mean is, without the plugins, WordPress becomes a plain vanilla blogging platform and I’d have to see how it measures up to the competing blogging platforms. Maybe it would still have advantages over the other blogging software, but maybe it wouldn’t.

Thanks to plugins, we WordPress users can easily create highly optimized blogs and sites that search engines love, add features that help us retain readers and monitor stats, and become more efficient bloggers. (See my post on “Things I do to optimize and secure every WordPress site and blog” to see all the wonderful ways we can improve the basic WordPress installation thanks to plugins.)

But luckily, we don’t have to seriously consider this question because plugins exist and new ones are being developed all the time. And that is why, at least for the foreseeable future, nothing can compete with WordPress. Viva la plugin developers!

Garry Conn

Hi Miriam!

You know… it’s a very interesting thought. I was sitting down in front of my laptop the other night and having some computer troubles… I am running Vista on 2 gigs or RAM… my laptop should be powerful enough to control the Space Shuttle… but it crashes on Vista… LOL!!

Anyway… somehow that got me to thinking about WordPress. What would like be without Microsoft Windows? And then… what would like be without WordPress Plugins…

I think life without WordPress Plugins for bloggers would be worse than life without Windows.

You can always gain access to your blog without being dependant on Windows. And for years I have defended Windows and IE against the Linux and FireFox crowds… and then Microsoft has to help shoot myself in the foot by releasing Windows ME version 2.0.. LOL!!!

Oh well… at least WordPress has plugins. 🙂
Miriam

Hey Gary! I think life would be pretty hard without Windows, since I still find many of the Office programs to be way superior to the online versions. Word and Excel still beat Google Docs and Spreadsheet hands down. And I can’t stand Gmail, so I use Outlook very happily.

But maybe I still like Windows because I didn’t upgrade to Vista! Vista sounds like a nightmare – new file types, humongous power/RAM needs, and not much to show for it. And now I know it crashes too – ugh.

I like what you said, though: “I think life without WordPress Plugins for bloggers would be worse than life without Windows.” There’s something to that, since every blog I build only reaches its full potential thanks to plugins.

Good luck with Vista!
Ryan

@Miriam – give Openoffice.org a try! It’s as good as MS Office and some would argue better 🙂 Plus it’s free 🙂 And as a bonus it works on Macs, linux boxes AND Windows.
Ryan

Oh, and to answer your question. Yes WordPress would be my blogging tool of choice even without plugins.

Does WordPress really have any opposition though? Blogspot doesn’t really count as you can’t even host it on your own web space. Plus WordPress straight out of the box is better than Blogspot anyway.

I tried TextPattern briefly, but gave it the flick almost immediately as it felt awkward to use.

There’s a good list of users opinions of various blogging software here … http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=467938 … the most popular by far was WordPress.
Miriam

Garry – I just realized I’ve been spelling your name wrong. I’m so sorry!

Ryan – I tried OpenOffice a while ago and couldn’t use it. I’m a powerish-user of Word since I write to make a living, and some of the documents I work with depend heavily on templates, styles, footnotes, and so much more. Maybe OpenOffice has improved since then, but I don’t have the time or need to check it out. MS Office 2003 really serves my needs well. But that doesn’t mean I would fork out the cash for Office 2007.

I know this is not WordPress related, but here’s something that I don’t understand about Microsoft: they have marketing and advertising budgets that match the budgets of small countries, and yet they didn’t manage to convince me one bit to upgrade to Vista or buy Office 2007. They didn’t manage to sell even one advantage of upgrading. And I’m a happy customer. It’s like they didn’t even try. It’s weird.

They should hire me 🙂
Ryan

OpenOffice.org is at about the same level as Office 2003 these days, maybe a little better. It certainly handles templates, styles and footnotes no problem and I assume anything else you’d want to throw at it. I actually prefer it personally, but I need to use a lot of custom designed plugins for Word for my job which aren’t available on OpenOffice.org 🙁 The latest Office 2007 does have quite a few extra features though – at least that’s what I’ve heard from others.
Kyle

Out of the box, a WordPress install is a little rough around the edges. It does one thing – plain and simple blogging, and does a pretty good job of that. For anything more complex, to have more control, to use it as a full CMS, you just gotta have plugins!

I think these guys at Automattic really knew what they were doing by providing a simple and stable platform which was very "pluggable" and released it to the Internet knowing that their baby would be adopted and cared for by the community… Great thinking.
Miriam Schwab

Hi Kyle – I think you’re right. This is yet another example of how Automattic made the right choices when developing their strategy.
Ryan

Kyle – what plugins do you think are necessary to use WordPress as a CMS?

The more I use WordPress, the less plugins I find I need as so many things can be controlled directly from the theme.
Kyle

Ryan,
You do need a good theme developer. For us, with no php experience, we’ve found plugins to be essential. Here’s some at the top of my list:
1. wpDirAuth Allows us to use our Novell LDAP to authenticate users.
2. Role Manager Can’t say enough good things about this one. Granular control over user privileges. Create custom roles.
3. DGE_InlineRSS Pulling feeds and html content from other parts of the site to populate our pages. This one I’m sure is costing us some performance, but we love the dynamic content.
4. ShiftThis.net | Swift SMTP Didn’t want to bother installing some kind of mail handler on the server and the network security people wouldn’t have allowed it anyway. So I let Gmail send any mails that need to be sent.
5. WP Super Cache As I’m using WordPress MU, this was a pain to set up. I wish that I didn’t have to use it, but performance takes a big hit otherwise.

Still looking for a good solution to the problem of file/upload management. The built-in tool is totally useless once you have lots of pictures and documents uploaded. Trying to find the file you want is a nightmare. Any suggestions?

Also I hate what the built-in editor does to my html. Try putting in multiple line-breaks… So I just disable it and use Windows Live Writer.
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binil

look buddy i have issues regarding plugins. agreed its excellent but to upload a plugin u need a webserver. what if i don have one … i jus wan a flashy blog for myself … is there any way i may be able to add a few plugins without going thru all the webserver n plugin folder problems …
please guide me if u can
Ryan

binil – If you don’t have a web host, then you are presumably hosting your blog on WordPress.com or something similar, in which case you are unlikely to be able to install any plugins.

Would we use WordPress if there were no plugins?

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