When plugins are so easy to implement as with wordpress, people can get a bit carried away and you end up with sites full of features that don’t really benefit its users, while this might be ok for a personal site that is used as a bit of a web playground; it can have a negative effect on sites that are should be more user focused.

Another more technical problem that arises from the use of plugins is that not all plugins produce code that validates or that follows good web standards practises, this can be very frustrating for web developers who know what they are doing as it means that their sites won’t validate if they don’t go through and sort out the plugins code. It creates a different problem for web masters who have little knowledge or interest in web standards as they can create feature rich site with ease without realising the problems.

Some of the plugins that I would like to see cleaned up are the Intouch plugin which at the moment inserts all the JavaScript and css in-line instead of separating it into a separate file. Also the Livesearch plugin which is very popular at the moment due to its ajaxyness creates non standard attributes to achieve something that can be done easily via JavaScript (a post on how to make the livesearch plugin validate has already been written).

I don’t mean to have a go at plugin developers or anything I mean I use both of the mentioned plugins on my site and they provide features that I am not capable of coding myself at the present time. I am just a bit of a stickler for clean code.