Don’t make the mistake of having more plugins than you really need. When planning and building a Craft CMS site, you want to limit the number of plugins you use to as very few as possible.
Why?
The majority of Craft plugins, let’s say 95%, are well built and maintained. If there are any necessary updates to be made, either critical bug fixes, upgrades to be compatible with a new Craft CMS build or security updates, these are handled by the Craft CMS developers and developer teams quickly and efficiently.
There are plugins that are built, though they can get abandoned and not updated. It’s not something to get angry or frustrated about; it’s just part of web development and for pragmatic reasons.
Let’s take a typical plugin scenario: a developer who has built a few sites in Craft is comfortable with the templates and is relatively competent on the build side of Craft. He is then asked by a client to build a custom feature into the site. This requires a plugin. The developer who has many years of web development experience, just not on the Craft side of things and whilst comfortable with say WordPress plugins, has never built a Craft plugin. He gets to work and builds a decent plugin, it works, and the client is happy.
The client asks for a few tweaks, and the developer implements these with relative ease. The developer then has a brainwave of releasing the plugin and making some money on the side. Not a bad idea, by all means, we all need to put food on the table.
The excited developer releases this plugin, and over the next few months, while sales are not overwhelming, they are decent. However, the developer is directed by his agency to other projects, and he doesn’t touch Craft for months. The plugin is left there, and whilst working fine, a new release of Craft comes along. The previously working plugin breaks with the latest release.
A few Github issues come in with other Craft developers and project managers are looking for an update to the made. The developer who has lost a lot of his early enthusiasm for the plugin and is absolutely snowed under with other non-Craft projects just doesn't have the time to maintain his plugin. We have a problem.
It’s not the developer's fault
We can’t blame the developer here; he works, as we all do, to provide safety and shelter for himself and his family. The developer has a life outside of his computer, and while he gets home from work during the week, he is tired and needs to attend to his family. There are just not enough hours in the day to rewrite the full plugin.
The above fictitious story can happen, and is a long way of saying don’t rely on ANY Craft plugin unless you absolutely have to.
If you can go down the native Craft route at all, I absolutely advise you to do so.
Plugins can break, develop bugs and be incompatible with future Craft releases.
If you at all, can, use ZERO plugins on your Craft sites.
Written by John Macpherson