: How do you handle bad scripts or plugins As web developers obviously we don't want to reinvent the wheel with everything we do so best practice would dictate when necessary we should use third
As web developers obviously we don't want to reinvent the wheel with everything we do so best practice would dictate when necessary we should use third party scripts and plugins.
Recently I have found a slew of 'bad' plugins for Wordpress, which fall into two categories;
The plugin works fine, but isn't written using current standards.
The plugin appears to work but is just written wrong.
Both plugins do what they say they will do, but in the first category you can't minify the javascript behind them because the javascript hasn't been written to conform to say jslint or any other code validation and in the second category the plugin uses potentially insecure code or incredibly inefficient code so under normal use it seems fine but under pressure seams become undone and the server gets hit with unnecessary loads.
The thing I can (and will) do is rate the plugin and provide feedback, but lets say 10000 people have downloaded the plugin and never need to minify it, or need to put it under pressure, my one negative review will be a drop in the ocean. It feels like more should be done.
What else should I do as a developer and we do as an industry to ensure sloppy third party plugins get brought up to speed?
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in the first category you can't minify the javascript behind them because the javascript hasn't been written to conform to say jslint or any other code validation
It doesn't matter if the code doesn't follow any "validation standard", you can still minify it just fine. Check out Closure Compiler, probably the best one around.
I would suggest avoiding the second one if there is a good chance it's insecure or inefficient. Your issues with the first one are likely easily fixed.
Fix it !
If you have the ability and the need to fix it, share the fixes with the world. or if someone else is making money off a really badly written plugin (and thus probably will make money off your fixes if you were to tell them), write a replacement, write something better. other than that there isn't much you can do about it, except for telling the developers or writing a blog post about it.
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