So I was asked this…
@binarygary: .@Ipstenu I know you aren’t the patent office…but have you ever declined a plugin for “obviousness”?
I replied, not in jest, that I had declined some for obliviousness.
Gary’s plugin was obvious in that it did exactly what it was purported to do, and it did it well. And it had a puny name. I quite liked it and approved it pretty quickly. But the crux of the question is interesting. Have I ever rejected plugins for being too obvious?
Not that I can remember. In fact, I kind of love the plugins that do exact what they claim to do. Like Rickroll which turns your videos into Rickroll or Logout Roulette which gives you a one in ten chance of being logged out. Those are simple and obvious and a little stupid, but they’re perfectly obvious and only the oblivious would be confused.
An obvious plugin is possibly the best kind of plugin. My buddy Otto once remarked that well named functions don’t need documentation. If you have a function named reset_the_loop it’s pretty obvious what it does. Now you might need to add some docblox to explain how to use it and what parameters you can pass through to it, but in and of itself, it resets the loop!
On the flip side, here’s rts_reset which is actually a function I saw recently in a plugin. Okay, what does that do? It was in a class named RTSCode which didn’t help at all. And there was no inline documentation. After a while, I traced everything back and sorted out what the heck the code was doing (it was reseting a query, but only if you passed specific params back).
In general, a WordPress theme and plugin should be painfully obvious. It’s open source, it’s code anyone can look at, and yes, it should be stupid easy to understand what it does and why. That’s the meaning behind ‘open’ in so many ways. Open for everyone. Open to be forked and learned from and studied and made more perfect. Or at least more fun.
I like obvious things. Obvious is good.
