The WordPress All in One SEO Pack is starting to rub me the wrong way.
I’m sure that being a WordPress plug-in developer is thankless work. One of the things that makes WordPress so powerful and loved by the web development and blogging community is that it is easily extensible (much like Firefox) via add-ons and plug-ins. WordPress’ open-source nature is what makes it all possible.
It also means that even if you do develop an amazing, everyone wants it, multi-million downloads, plug-in, you aren’t going to make a dime. Released as WordPress GPL, GNU General Public License, the software prevents WordPress plug-in developers from charging for their plugins.
The best developers can hope for is to ask for donations and hope that it adds up to something. I have no experience in this area, but from what I’ve read, it appears that not even the most popular WordPress plugins manage to squeeze out more than a token amount of donations for their software creations.
However, this is the nature of the beast, and no plugin would have ever achieved the popularity it has today without having been developed and released under this model. It’s a Catch-22. Why should a developer spend the time and effort keeping a popular plugin up to date when they don’t get paid? But also, the plugin would have never been popular enough to charge for if it hadn’t been released for free in the first place.
In the end, most developers accept this paradigm either because they have no choice, or because they love WordPress.
All in One SEO Pack Upgrades Force Enabling
Lately, every single time I upgrade the All in One SEO Pack plug-in, it disables the plugin via its own settings regardless of whether it was already active in the WordPress control panel. In fact, activating All in One SEO in the WordPress plugins panel does nothing, because the top setting inside the plugin is Enabled/Disabled.
I’m not sure what the point of this is, but now that it disables itself with every upgrade, even though it remembers every single other setting, it seems like it is trying to force you to go into the All in One SEO settings in order to click the Enable button. Of course, on that screen right above the Enable setting is bright yellow text asking you to donate.
Now, I’m not saying that I know anything. Maybe, there is a good reason for this, but it seems to me like the only purpose is to try and increase the money the developer gets from donations. I guess the idea is that if you have to go enable it all the time, then you will see the Please Donate notice all the time and that would make more people donate.
It might be a good idea, except I have dozens of websites and I don’t appreciate having to both upgrade AND enable this plug-in on every single one of them. Frankly, I’ve gotten good enough at doing my own SEO, that I really only use this WordPress plugin as a backup, just in case. If the next upgrade goes the same way, I’ll be deleting All in One SEO WordPress plugin from my blogs.
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