{"id":78595,"date":"2012-05-28T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-05-28T14:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wpmu.org\/?p=78595"},"modified":"2012-05-24T05:45:55","modified_gmt":"2012-05-24T09:45:55","slug":"free-plugin-support-how-to-know-who-is-there-to-help","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/free-plugin-support-how-to-know-who-is-there-to-help\/","title":{"rendered":"Free Plugin Support – How to Know Who is There to Help"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"FreeOne of the issues with free plugins is that they are sometimes not well-supported.<\/p>\n

This isn’t a complaint against developers. Far from it in fact – regular readers of my posts will know that I champion free plugin developers. It is just a statement of fact.<\/p>\n

If you are planning on using a particularly complicated plugin, knowing whether or not it is supported can make a big difference. \u00a0And that is where WordPress.org’s<\/a> newly redesigned plugins repository<\/a> comes in:<\/p>\n

\"Support\"<\/p>\n

Where there once was a compact list of the most recent support forum posts, there is now a simple message which informs you of how many support threads have been resolved in the previous three weeks. This gives you an instant idea of how well supported a plugin is – by the actual developer and\/or the WordPress community.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, if you click on the “View support forum” button, you are taken through to a clean and simple forum screen, where you can view all of the most recent threads. Even if a plugin seems to not be well-supported, it could always be a bunch of people asking stupid or irrelevant questions (it happens).<\/p>\n

How Do the Big Boys Perform?<\/h2>\n

As a little experiment, I thought I’d take a look at the top 5 WordPress plugins from our top 100 list<\/a>\u00a0and see how many support threads had been resolved in the previous three weeks.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Google XML Sitemaps<\/a>: 0 of 10<\/li>\n
  2. W3 Total Cache<\/a>: 6 of 40<\/li>\n
  3. NextGEN Gallery<\/a>: 4 of 93<\/li>\n
  4. Contact Form 7<\/a>: 20 of 78<\/li>\n
  5. WordPress SEO by Yoast<\/a>: 105 of 108<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Unfortunately, four of the top five plugins seem<\/em>\u00a0to be poorly supported, which isn’t terribly encouraging. It rather underlines the argument that if you want a functional and well-supported plugin, you need to go premium.<\/p>\n

    You should however take the numbers with a pinch of salt – there is every chance that (a) a query has been resolved but not marked as such, or (b) you’re dealing with a complete moron:<\/p>\n

    \"Support
    He didn't get a response within 4 hours...how dare we neglect him!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    The support thread resolution ratio shouldn’t necessarily determine whether or not you use a particular plugin, but it certainly should<\/em> come into consideration.<\/p>\n

    Creative commons image courtesy of\u00a0loop_oh<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The recent WordPress plugins repository redesign offered up a few new features…one of them being at-a-glance support thread resolution numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84405,"featured_media":78598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"blog_reading_time":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_tutorials_categories":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[37],"tutorials_categories":[],"class_list":["post-78595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-plugins","tag-forums"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84405"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=78595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/78598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=78595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=78595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=78595"},{"taxonomy":"tutorials_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wpmudev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tutorials_categories?post=78595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}