There is an interesting comment stream going on over at OMNINOGGIN at the moment. Thaya has released another version of his excellent plugin WP Greet Box. As well as some new functionality the update adds a box to the dashboard which contains the titles, and links to, the last three WordPress development posts he has posted on his blog. In essence it is just a feedreader pointed at his feed.
He has done this to try and inspire a little extra traffic to his blog, but a few people have taken against this because they were surprised by it. It isn’t an opt-in, but you can easily turn it off in the same way as anything else on the Dashboard.
I can see why plugin authors want to do this kind of thing. It is getting harder and harder to stand out in the WordPress community and so it is harder to gain as much benefit. I am not sure how much benefit this will bring, but as he isn’t doing anything but telling us, in a passive way, what is happening on his blog, I don’t really mind it.
What do you think? Is it reasonable for plugin authors to try and show us more about their site (these plugins are free after all) or should the plugin just do its thing and leave us alone?
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[...] to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.Powered by WP Greet BoxA few weeks back I wrote about Thaya’s (Omninoggin) attempt to derive some benefit from his free plugins. There was a debate as to whether he was going about it in the right way. Thaya has now decided to [...]
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[...] people were unhappy at my attempts to gain traffic from my plugins by displaying an OMNINOGGIN widget in the WordPress adminitration dashboard by default.
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In this instance, as I’ve already said, I don’t really mind. But I think you have a point about the general desirability of this approach if everyone decided to do it.
I wonder if there is a better approach, such as one of the feed lists on the dashboard being a general update channel for the plugins that plugin authors can hook into and add a targeted feed to? It has a lot of potential for misuse, but no less so than just adding stuff.
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Thanks for the heads up. It should be fixed now.
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p.s. your comment form has a bug in firefox on OSX- it jumps back to the name field when you click into it :)
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Great post :) I’m the first person to post a comment at the OMNINOGGIN blog as it concerned me that something had been activated without my consent. I think that it’s a bit cheeky to just activate a panel on the dashboard…..and where does it end? visitor stats? blogging behaviors? other personal statistics????….. all in the name of self promotion due to it being FREE?
If a notice was made after installation- then maybe its fine- but that’s my point- my consent would have been nice before this NAGWARE was turned on :)
I can foresee some real issues in the future for the Wordpress community if devs just turn on what they want….because they develop for free.
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[...] Rickmann chimed in today asking what plugin authors can do to benefit from creating plugins. I remember a similar [...]
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I also noticed the something similar when I installed the Yoast Breadcrumbs plugin. It took me a minute to realize what the Yoast feed was doing in my dashboard, since I didn’t see any mention of this in any readme file or other documentation.
Honestly, I really don’t mind. I could remove it easily if I wanted to, but it’s not a big deal to me. Like you said, the plugin is free, and this is a pretty passive way to at least get a little traffic coming their way.
This is kind of like putting PayPal donation buttons inside plugin pages in the WP admin panel. Some people might make donations, others won’t, but overall it’s harmless and may motivate the plugin developer to develop more useful free plugins.