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Jeff Chandler

Time To Say Goodbye To Dolly?

diggingintowordpressDigging Into WordPress has an interesting poll online asking the question, Should the Hello Dolly plugin be included with WordPress? I won’t divulge the numbers but I can say that the majority of people who have voted for the poll say No, it should be removed.

Honestly, Hello Dolly doesn’t bother me much at all. The reason it’s bundled with WordPress is to give new plugin authors the ability to dive through an established plugin to figure out how the plugin system works and for developing their own. Hello Dolly doesn’t slow anything down. I know many people simply delete the plugin after installing WordPress, especially those who install WordPress for their clients. If Hello Dolly sticks around, it won’t bother me. If it is retired to the plugin repository, it won’t bother me. Thankfully though, there are different methods for installing WordPress that are coming around which actually provide the option not to install Hello Dolly upon initial installation.

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9 responses to “Time To Say Goodbye To Dolly?”

  1. I remember, after my very first-ever install of WordPress, seeing “Hello Dolly” being listed in the plugin list, and being very, very confused. (It didn’t help that the plugin had some incredibly grandiose but terribly uninformative description, as I recall.)

    I had no idea what the plugin was, or what it was supposed to do; whether I should activate/deactivate it; whether I could safely delete it.

    It is for those reasons – that it serves no useful purpose for a WordPress *user*, is intended specifically for a WordPress (plugin) developer, and is/can be confusing for a new WordPress user – that I support removing it from the default install.

    Of course, Jeff, why not advocate a custom *developer* install of WordPress, which could rightfully and meaningfully include Hello Dolly?

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  2. Someone professional needs to pretend they are a n00b installing their first WP, and do a total overhaul of the wording that you see on your first install. Hello Dolly is one example, and its description like the previous commenter said. The references to the “famous 5 minute install” is another example. These are legacy jokes left in, probably from Matt in early versions. Should be re-written to provide simple, clear, non-confusing guidance to new people, and be efficient to stay out of the way of experienced users.

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  3. To be honest, when I wrote my first plugin, Hello Dolly was the last place I looked. There are so many tutorials that will teach you how to write a far better and more useful plugin than that plugin.

    If a plugin is included to help developers, then maybe it should be one that at least ads an options/settings page, and stores some options to the database, then it might be a useful resource.

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  4. The arguments for keeping this plugin are quite weak. Developers don’t benefits from this plugin, they benefit from the codex and the plugin repository. This plugin doesn’t help WordPress users improve their site. The only people that benefit from it are people who like “Hello, Dolly!”… The rest of us are stuck deleting it (every upgrade) or ignoring it. People clam it’s easy to delete, so that’s why we should keep it, but you could also argue that it’s easy to install. There are a lot of other plugins that are more deserving to be in core than this one. I don’t think this plugin represents all that WordPress stands for and even if it did, I don’t think that’s a reason to have it as a default plugin. This plugin also wastes a lot of people’s time… I think it would be funny if someone tracked how much time it wasted the WordPress community. I think a reasonable max estimate would be something like 22 years for WordPress 2.8 alone, lol.

    I personally don’t like the cultural bias in WordPress, it’s definitely a turn off.

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  5. More deserving plugins would be better off being bundled with WordPress. Hello Dolly is a novelty and does nothing useful.

    Maybe on each WordPress release they could add the current top 5 downloaded or rated plugins to a release. Add a bit of variety to the package.

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  8. Hmm, out of all the comments here, I do think Dan makes a lot of great points. The next time I have Matt on the air for an interview, I’ll have to ask him about Hello dolly being bundled with WordPress. So far in that poll, 76% of people say it should be removed.

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