I presume WordPress plugins are made by third parties.
Do plugins have to be kept up to date with WordPress upgrades?
Can plugins become obsolete?
If they do become obsolete, say with plugins for Linkedin Share buttons, Twitter Tweet buttons, and Facebook Like buttons, would switching to different plugins cause the count of likes / tweets / shares to be lost?
And if plugins becoming obsolete is possible, does it tend to happen?
Or are plugins generally kept up to date?
Or are they open source, so other people would keep them up to date?
(As you can probably guess, I’m not a programmer.)
2 Answers
I presume WordPress plugins are made by third parties.
For the moment, yes; all except for “Hello Dolly!” and “Akismet”, which are part of the core distribution.
Do plugins have to be kept up to date
with WordPress upgrades?
Certainly they should be; but they’re not required to be kept up-to-date.
Can plugins become obsolete?
And if plugins becoming obsolete is
possible, does it tend to happen?
They can, and do. It does tend to happen, yes. There are currently almost 15,000 Plugins listed in the Repository. The oldest ones were last updated in 2004. (Some become obsolete through abandonment; others become obsolete because their functionality gets rolled into core.)
If they do become obsolete, say with
plugins for Linkedin Share buttons,
Twitter Tweet buttons, and Facebook
Like buttons, would switching to
different plugins cause the count of
likes / tweets / shares to be lost?
It depends on the Plugin. If a Plugin stores such data in the database, then another Plugin could easily make use of those data.
Or are plugins generally kept up to
date?
It depends entirely on the Plugin developer, and often, the popularity/usefulness of the Plugin.
And as EAMann mentioned below, you can get a good idea of a Plugin’s status via the “Requires:” header tag and the “Tested Up To:” header tag. If the “Tested Up To:” tag indicates a recent version of WordPress, the Plugin is much more likely to be still under continual development.
Or are they open source, so other
people would keep them up to date?
This is possible also. Some Plugin developers will welcome patches, or add people as SVN committers for the Plugin. Other times, Plugins are simply forked.
