Plugins

Plugins extend and expand the functionality of WordPress. They are an important part of WP sites and are great if used wisely. However, be aware that there are a lot of crappy plugins out there that can mess up your code, make your site slow, creates a security risk etc. etc.

Here is a list of do and don'ts.

Do

• Check out the list of our highly used whitelisted plugins and preferably install those in your project.
• If you find a new great plugin not listed in this gitbook make sure to check out:
  • Number of active installs
  • User rating
  • Update frequency
  • Compatible WP version
  • Size of community / how people contribute to the plugin code
  • Any offered support / forum. Do people get answers to their questions
  • Number of issues reported. Take a look and see if they raise a red flag.
  • Paid or free (Paid is no issue, but important to look at the subscription details)
  • Ask a colleague if you need a second opinion
• Uninstall if you decide not to use the plugin in your project so that you don't have installed plugins that you don't use.
• Keep the number of plugins to a minimum

Don'ts

• Install plugins that do more or less the same (e.g. ACF and Meta Box)
• Use plugins that make your site slow, creates a security risk

Note! : The ripples theme dequeues jQuery in frontend by default. The reason is because the theme uses RequireJS to load frontend dependencies. If your plugin is depending on jQuery in the front, see if there is a way to load the script using RequireJS and set jQuery as a dependency. Check out the Javascript section for more details about using javascript in Ripples.