WordPress Plugins make web design easier

Here’s one great reason why I love WordPress: Plugins!

Plugins help the ordinary geezer – folks who have zero  (or very little) knowledge of web development – to build web sites and apps that have all the functionality the modern user expects.

It’s like this: in the old days (aye, about 3 years ago) you had to know a fair bit of HTML, some CSS and a bit of Javascript to be able to make websites with all the latest functionality. People used to say “Structure your content with HTML, style it with CSS, and make it do stuff with Javascript”.

But over the past three years make-your-own website and content management systems (CMSs) have improved greatly, along with ready made plugins and widgets (gadgets, widgets with functionality that can be ‘bolted on’ to existing websites or CMSs), to the extent that the average geezer can produce a pretty good site, with lots of functionality, with very little knowledge of what goes on ‘under the hood’.

Take WordPress, for example. When I first came across it back in 2004 it was a pretty straightforward piece of blog software. But now it’s huge. Yes, enormous. And it’s powerful and accessible and it has a massive community developing all those handy little functions you might want on a website…for example, a 3D revolving tag cloud, just like the one I installed on this blog this evening.

It’s developed by a guy called Roy Tanck, and you can see his version of the 3D tag cloud here.

Uploading and installing a plugin like this can be quite complex to the newcomer, but when you’ve uploaded and experimented with a half dozen you very quickly get the general idea. This one took me about 7 minutes to upload, install and get working. Imagine how long that would have taken me to code it from scratch (I would have had to learn the Flash platform first, for heaven sake).

So, thank you to the WordPress Community for providing all these things…for free. And since I haven’t got the PHP coding skills to be able to contribute my own plugins, I can at least contribute by praising WordPress, raising awareness and spreading the word of the Open Source movement and software development.

If you’re interested in browsing the range of plugins (and there are many thousands) for WordPress then check out the directory.