I’ve extolled the virtues and pitfalls of running a software as a service business. ((Photo courtesy of Rufus Gefangenen)) This morning I discovered a glitch in my SaaS website that, while it doesn’t cause anything to actually malfunction, creates a very obnoxious problem on a lot of the pages. The site is written in WordPress1 and the entire SaaS component of the site is built out of plugins.23 Basically, one of the plugins creates a form that is used in one of the pages. The malfunction is that the form is now included on every page. Ugh. This is going to be a really fun bughunt because even when I disabled every single plugin, the problem persisted. Apparently the glitch started appearing about a month ago – when I last updated WordPress.
Now, I’ve been meaning to just rewrite the plugin from scratch – but I’m also keenly aware of the pitfalls. My biggest incentive to rewrite the code is so that it is more future-proof. Another reason to do it is that the original code was written in such a cludgy manner I’m literally ashamed to tell you how it is implemented. Let’s just say that I originally wrote the core of the plugin after having learned the basics of PHP programming only a few months prior.45 About nine months later, I shoehorned the same code into a WordPress plugin – when I had only been using WordPress for about two months and knew almost nothing about plugins. Now, more than five-and-a-half years from the day I launched the site, I do feel I’m a much more capable PHP programmer and WordPress plugin writer. Confident in my abilities to do a better job and facing the task of having to go through a potentially big bughunt anyhow, some part of me wonders if it wouldn’t be best to just rewrite the damn thing anyhow.
Default Series Title- My first open source love [↩]
- Such as the awesome Simple Series plugin, OCD plugin stats plugin, and EZ Creative Commons license plugin! [↩]
- How’s that for a plug about plugins? [↩]
- Look… it works, okay. [↩]
- Mostly works. [↩]
