Last month, we pit the 64 most popular WordPress plugins against each other in Torque’s 2016 Plugin Madness. We have witnessed several upsets along the way, and some of WordPress’s most beloved plugins, like SEO by Yoast, Akismet, and Jetpack by WordPress.com, have met defeat.
We have received more than 15,000 votes so far, and, with only a few weeks left in the competition, it’s been narrowed to just four plugins — The Events Calendar, WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, and Wordfence Security. We reached out to our semi-finalists to see if they had any advice for creating successful plugins and to share their favorite things about WordPress.
Let’s take a look at our semi-finalists.
The Events Calendar
The Events Calendar lets you easily create a calendar to share your events. It is highly customizable, though is built to work out of the box. It is chock-full of awesome features like event search, Google Calendar and iCal exporting, Google maps, Calendar month view with tooltips, and more. Built and supported by Modern Tribe, The Events Calendar has been vetted by WordPress experts for optimal plugin compatibility and compliance with WordPress best practices.
We talked to Modern Tribe’s Director of Products, Zach Tirrell.
Torque: What advice would you go to plugin developers who are just starting out? What’s the key to creating a successful WordPress plugin?
Zach: Build a plugin that solves a problem you are facing directly. When Modern Tribe built The Events Calendar, we wanted a plugin that would work for the sites we were building. We have continued to evolve it and make it better by working directly with customers to solve real problems. Beyond that though, giving really exceptional support is a big differentiator. I could not be more proud of our support team and the way they represent the joy and helpfulness that defines Modern Tribe.
Torque: What’s your favorite thing about WordPress?
Zach: We love building on top of WordPress. The toolbox it provides is really empowering, be it the fundamentals we use in our plugins like actions, filters, and custom post types, or the new hotness in the REST API that we used to build the brand new tri.be site.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a the most popular eCommerce plugin for WordPress, powering a whopping 30 percent of all online stores. With an entire industry built around WooCommerce, there are hundreds of free and premium extensions to give your eCommerce site endless flexibility. This plugin allows you to sell both physical and digital products alike and is bundled with the ability to accept PayPal, all major credit cards, bank transfers, and cash on delivery.
We talked to Co-founder of WooThemes, Magnus Jepson.
Torque: What advice would you go to plugin developers who are just starting out? What’s the key to creating a successful WordPress plugin?
Magnus: As a new plugin developer just starting out, I would refer to the handbook. I’d also focus on core functionality of the plugin to start and then adding UI when necessary.
Torque: What’s your favorite thing about WordPress?
Magnus: That it’s easy to setup on your website, even easier now with one-click installs, and the fact that you can build almost anything on top of WordPress.
Wordfence Security
Wordfence Security is the most downloaded WordPress security plugin. It features several security features to keep your site safe, like login security, security scanning, WordPress firewall, monitoring features, IPv6 Compatible, and more. Wordfence also includes support for several popular WordPress plugins and themes, like WooCommerce. Plus, it’s 100 percent free and open source.
We talked to CEO and Co-founder of Wordfence Security Mark Maunder.
Torque: What advice would you go to plugin developers who are just starting out? What’s the key to creating a successful WordPress plugin?
Mark: When I started out creating Wordfence, I did it to solve a real problem. My personal site had been hacked in 2011 via the TimThumb vulnerability. There was very little data on WordPress vulnerabilities and how to protect against them. I ended up reverse engineering the hack, following the hackers’ footprints and discovering a zero-day vulnerability in the TimThumb script that was widely used by themes to resize images. It allowed a remote attacker to upload a malicious script and take control of a website.
Once I’d secured my own site, I contributed code to the TimThumb project that fixed the vulnerability and ended up doing a major rewrite of much of TimThumb’s code and working with the developer to help incorporate those changes.
Through this process, I realized that the WordPress community needed a world-class security product to help prevent hacks in future and to get an early warning if a breach has occurred. So, really I created Wordfence to solve a problem that I had.
I’ve found that this applies to some of the best businesses and projects including creating a new plugin: Start by solving a real problem that you have and that no one else is solving for you. The effect of taking this approach is that you become your own first customer and that guides your product and design decisions. If you take this approach it becomes very easy to recruit other customers because you already understand the value that your product offers and the very real problem that it’s solving.
The rest is just growing it into a big and vibrant project or, if you choose the commercial route, growing it into a big business. We are now a team of 14 distributed across the USA and across the globe in countries like Sweden and Greece and we can’t hire fast enough. Wordfence is used by over a million active websites and we have between 40,000 to 50,000 paying customers. All that started because some hacker created a problem on a personal blog that needed solving.
Torque: What’s your favorite thing about WordPress?
Mark: Consider the impact that the printing press had on society when it was invented by Gutenberg in the 1400s. Suddenly ideas could spread in the form of printed books and this ultimately led to the Renaissance which saw a huge acceleration in human development, culture, education and in fields like science and mathematics.
WordPress — and specifically the open source version of WordPress that lets you host your own site — is a way for individuals to own a virtual printing press. They no longer have to rely on a “cloud” provider to host their website for them. Instead, they can own their own web server and have complete control of their publishing medium without any caveats.
For me personally, that’s my favorite thing about WordPress.org, the open source publishing platform. I love that it empowers individuals to spread ideas on their own terms.
Advanced Custom Fields
Advanced Custom Fields allows easy customization to sites that need more flexible data. With more than 20 different field types to choose from, this plugin allows you to easily customize your WordPress site. Advanced Custom Fields enables you to select from multiple input types, assign your fields to multiple edit pages, easily load data through a simple API, and more.
We talked to the creator of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, Elliot Condon.
Torque: What advice would you go to plugin developers who are just starting out? What’s the key to creating a successful WordPress plugin?
Elliot: Keep things simple. Focus on quality of your plugin and allow the development of your plugin/business to grow based on user feedback and usage.
The key to creating a successful plugin is finding the right direction for your plugin. Listening to user feedback and requests while respecting your own vision.
Torque: What’s your favorite thing about WordPress?
Elliot: The two best functions ever thought of – add_action() and apply_filters()
Don’t forget to go to pluginmadness.com to vote now!
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