Greetings! Today I continue criticizing the “Hide My Dates” plugin. Dear author — no offense 🙂
How about this situation: guests come over, eat, make a mess, and leave. Don’t like it? Neither do I. And reading that WordPress plugins leave a lot of garbage behind after removal — I don’t like that either. Especially since I love clean, elegant, and well-documented code. But here we are — some strange records remain in the database, and they’re even loaded automatically on every page reload. And what if your blog has been running for three, five, or even more years? Just imagine what gets loaded each time. Yeah... that scares me too.
So, what to do about it? The answer: write proper plugins.
Not like this: slap some code together, add a “Donate” button, upload to wordpress.org and sit back waiting for cash to flow. Do it right — make it for people. Don’t think only of profit. Everything you need is already in the API! Even I — a beginner WordPress developer — understand how it works. For example, we use the get_option function to retrieve a setting from the DB. And right on the same codex page, under “Related”, there’s a delete_option function to remove it. Simple — everyone’s happy. Write plugins as the documentation recommends — and all will be well.
In situations like this I usually say: if you don’t like it — don’t use it, or do it better. I think that’s a fair take. So that’s what I did — wrote my own simpler and more efficient version of the “Hide My Dates” plugin, which I now use on my site. You’ll be able to read about it in an upcoming article — and download the plugin too.
Thanks for reading!
