So the next plugin entered into the competition is WP-Devel.
What this plugin does, quite openly (i.e. this isn’t a criticism) is take the functionality provided by three plugins and package it up a little better using the fourth:
It provides a massive amount of debugging information (when you are viewing public pages and logged in as an admin) including:
To be honest though it provides far too much information. Getting the information is all well and good but I couldn’t even find some of my classes in the list. It is hard for me to see how I could use this more effectively than a simple var_dump of the one thing I actually needed to see.
It isn’t really fair to criticise this plugin for that though as these things all came from somewhere else. That is the real reason why I wouldn’t rate this plugin in a competition.
A key reason that I decided to rate all the plugins myself is that I wasn’t happy with last year’s winner. Not because the plugin was bad, it wasn’t. By all accounts it was a good a plugin. But much of the code and ideas had already been done. Sure they were done in a longhand manner, sometimes by altering the theme, but I saw nothing new in it, and that is what I want: new, original, interesting, and complete.
This plugin isn’t as useful as last year’s winner (WP Comment Remix). Partly because it is aimed at the very people who know how to get at the information themselves anyway and partly because there are far fewer folks who would use this functionality, no matter how good it is, than would be interested in fancy commenting stuff.
I don’t think I’ll use it for developing my theme, and I don’t think it is going to score well in my rating of the competition, but I would be interested to hear from anyone who has used this, or the plugins that were collected together to make this, and found it to be useful.