As a developer under the time pressures of the client, it is often less hassle to use and off-the-shelf solution to meet a feature request, this means the developer actually becomes ‘the configurer’. But there are serious long term issues that can arise from taking this approach to development.

I work a lot with wordpress and magento. Everyday I hear about a new plugin or extension that’s awesome as well as an old plugin that’s gone bad. There seems to be a shift recently in developers putting the hours in to build plugins from scratch and then re-using it on multiple projects. This is for a good reason. When we use a third party plugin, we are all but handing our app over to the plugin builder. If they get compromised, so do you.

That’s not to say it’s always a bad thing. Sometimes, there really is no business case in reinventing the wheel. Although always be cautious and when it comes to making a decision, follow these guidelines;

1. Check to see if the plugin is from a reputable source.
2. Study the plugin reviews. This will give you an idea of how it has performed for other users.
3. Look at the number of downloads it’s had, a high number is a good indication of good performance.
4. Study the plugins source code to ensure there isn’t anything sketchy going in in there.
5. Check to see when the plugin was last updated.
6. Premium is not always best, sometimes it can be better even when it’s free.

My personal point of view is, it’s much more satisfying to build stuff yourself as long as it makes business sense to spend the extra time doing so, this way you can do it right and can re-use the feature over and over again.