Informative Interview With Otto42

Bob Dunn who is the author of BobWP.com has published an excellent interview with Samuel Wood otherwise known as Otto42. In the interview, we learn the origin of his nickname Otto. However, I think one of the most interesting points in the interview are Otto’s thoughts on plugins.

If I have 100 plugins all doing their own thing, and I just combine them all into one file somewhere, then the code remains the same and there’s no advantages in doing so. Having them separate, with their own names, and their own descriptions, provides a way to keep track of things. I use snippets a lot too, but I put each snippet into its own plugin, for simplicity of management.

The number of plugins doesn’t matter, the code is what matters, and where that code lives is unimportant. WordPress itself implements a lot of its own internal functionality in the same way a plugin would do so.

His response has been very consistent over the years. In 2011, he pretty much provided the same answer when Ryan Imel of WPCandy published an article about the same topic. I also chimed in on this topic in 2011 where I discussed Plugin Quality, not Plugin Quantity. This is one of those things in the world of WordPress that I’ve seen change over the past few years. The line of thought used to be that you could only run so many plugins before you ran into problems or, you shouldn’t run more than a certain amount. I’m glad to see this urban myth slowly but surely, being put to rest.