You have made yet-another stupidly easy plugin. I love it!
My buddy James said that after testing a plugin I wrote for WordPress that has no settings.
Frankly those are my favorite plugins, the ones where you install them and walk away because they do one thing, they do it well, and you’re done.
A plugin without options means it does the one thing, I don’t have to decide how I want it to work, and it just goes. Now, at the same time, a black box plugin with no information can be complicated and tricky, which means you have to sit and make the decisions thoughtfully at the beginning.
The first question I ask is “Who is it for?”
I love W3TC, but dear god is it complicated. It’s doing a lot of things and while it does them all very well, it’s hard to understand what all the settings mean and how they all need to work together. When I set about adopting a Varnish plugin, it was picked by my coworkers specifically because it was simple and it worked the majority of the time. Can you break it with other plugins and themes? Sure. That’s the nature of WordPress interoperability. But at the same time, it works without user interaction.
That was the key, we felt. A plugin that just runs, no user interface needed, just let it go. This was simple, this was easy, and this was direct.
Since then, I’ve added in two ‘options.’ One is the ability to define your true IP address. This is for people who are behind proxy services like CloudFlare. The way a Varnish purge works, is it sends a command to the domain name. If your domain is handled by CloudFlare’s servers, then it gets messy. The second was a ‘purge all’ button on the toolbar, which let you manually flush the entire site.
Those two settings are hard and easy to access. The defining the IP can only be done via editing your wp-config.php or via command line. Why? The majority of people don’t need it. It’s actually often a latency issue when you cache a cache with a proxy, so it’s not really the best idea in the first place. The purge button is limited only to the admins of a site, because they’re the only ones who should be flushing the cache for an entire site anyway.
Does this work for ‘everyone’? No. No it doesn’t. Of the 6000 people who like it just fine, there are about a dozen who want things differently. They want a settings page, where they can allow more people to flush cache and define the IP. They want a per-page flush button. They want better error reporting.
I’m with them on the last one but the others… well it’s interesting. Adding more complications will certainly expand the usability of the plugin, but is that the goal of this plugin? No. In many ways, it would be much better to make a second, different, plugin. Maybe an add-on. Call it “Varnish Advanced” for those people who need more power.
But the majority need the simple because I knew my target audience were the people who didn’t know or want to know the technical stuff. I handed them a plugin that works in the majority of use cases. I made sure it handled the majority of situations. And I made it so they could just install and walk away.
I do agree that it needs a little better error reporting, but even that has to be handled carefully. You can’t just hand an end-user an error without simultaneously giving them a direct way to correct it. And no ‘Talk to your host.’ is not a fix. A fix means the user can do something (hopefully simple) to correct a problem. Now, my ‘edit the wp-config file’ fix is not super simple for everyone, but at the same time it serves an important purpose. It makes someone think about how big a change is and what it means.
Knowing my users means I know they need that stop to think, and it means I know they will think.
