I came to share my ideas, which is not a product of whim or hearsay, but based on my personal experience in several years of using WordPress, the learning process and continuous practice summarized. While I don't intend to be preachy in a way that convinces you to accept my ideas, I hope that by sharing my experience, I can give you an idea of why I've formed these thoughts after years of using WordPress. 😆😆😆

Initially, I was attracted to WordPress because it is open source and highly extensible. These two features allowed me to quickly add needed functionality to my site. For example, when I need to display snippets of code in a technical blog, I simply search for the relevant code plugin in the plugin repository, find the right plugin, install it, set it up, and I'm ready to go.

For example, I don't like the pagination style of the default theme, and after searching for "page navi", I can always find many suitable plugins to solve the problem.

This ease of extensibility made it so that for the first few years, I thought I could easily implement any feature as long as I could find the right plugin, and even felt like I was becoming a WordPress "expert". However, as I used more and more plugins, problems arose.

The more plugins there are, the more bloated the site becomes, compatibility issues between plugins are a common nuisance, and contacting the plugin authors when there is a problem with one of the plugins doesn't always result in a timely response. It doesn't matter if it's free or paid. There are also incompatibility issues between different plugins that are even more of a headache for me. Conflicts between multiple plugins make me abandon some of the plugins I'm using and look for new alternatives, but the new plugins may trigger compatibility issues again, caught in a vicious cycle, hahaha.

This is even more common for those complex website projects. Over the years, I have dabbled in a wide variety of projects, including blogs, social platforms, forums, e-commerce sites, etc. I've done all of these, and I've used a very wide variety of plugins. With some experience, although I have also summarized some whole sets of plugin combination solutions, but the additional needs of customers often break the balance of these plugin combinations, resulting in the collapse of the entire site functionality, and have to seek a new solution.

So realized that relying on plugins doesn't go far. I also started to learn how to code in order to meet the customization needs of my clients and would also develop the required functionality modules on my own. Gradually, I also mastered these skills and I started to reduce my dependence on plugins and integrate more features into custom themes. Of course, there were many failures along the way.

For example, when developing an e-commerce website, I only use WooCommerce as the basic plugin, and other functional modules can be written partly by myself. Problems caused by plugin incompatibility can be effectively avoided.

While I've reduced my reliance on plugins, I haven't dismissed the extensibility of WordPress. On the contrary, I've developed a deeper understanding of WordPress' extensibility, which not only provides great flexibility at the code level, but also through the REST API and custom interfaces (This is great.), allowing developers to perform a variety of complex development tasks on their platforms.

I can now confidently say that I have changed from a plugin-dependent "user" to a self-developed "developer". Although I still respect and appreciate those developers who have contributed to the WordPress plugin ecosystem, I hope that more and more WordPress users can go beyond the dependence on plugins, through learning and practice, to improve their own development capabilities, this is a long way to go, as long as you have been using him, you have to keep practicing.

In the WordPress road ahead of friends, I hope to be more rational and long-term vision of the use of plug-ins and WordPress extensibility, the charm of WordPress is not only in its convenience, but also lies in its infinite possibilities, as long as we are willing to explore and try, WordPress can become an unlimited extension of our creativity.