Dude NO THUMBNAILS is not good

[Ripside]

Your suggestion of “add another plugin” in order to add thumbnails is frowned upon by users like me. We already have too many plugins. Not to mention your plugins.

Users like me were able to add things like “recent posts” or “suggested posts” in their sidebars with the thumbnail images. But NOT so with this Generate Press Theme. This inability is the one thing that keeps this theme from being perfect.

I think this should be enabled in the Generate Press Theme as it is in most other themes. If you are able to Tom please find a way to include this ability in a future Theme update.

I would use another theme just for this option, but I have grown attached to your theme.. (not to mention the 20 bucks I spent on it!)

-Ripside

[Tom]

Hi there,

Most themes I’ve seen don’t have a recent posts widget with images, unless it’s one of those overly bloated themeforest themes (yuck).

The whole point of GeneratePress is that it’s a lightweight theme, with only the essentials. Then, as a user, you can extend it to include only the things you need and want.

There’s actually very little difference between you adding a plugin with this functionality and me adding the code into the theme. The only place you will see any difference is on the “Plugins” page, which takes a little longer to load with a lot of plugins since they have to check for updates.

This plugin does way more than I would ever consider adding into the theme: https://wordpress.org/plugins/recent-posts-widget-extended/ – why use another theme which wouldn’t have the options included in this plugin, just to have images in your recent posts widget? Seems like adding the plugin is a way better solution – in my opinion at least.

That’s not to say I’ll never add functionality like this, but at this time, I don’t really see the point. As a user, I would rather use a plugin being focused on by a plugin author than have a theme developer (who has to focus on all aspects of the theme, and add-ons) add it and forget about it.

Hopefully this kind of explains my stance on it – I use to have another theme which was bloated with custom widgets and all kinds of other stuff. I want to make sure GP stays lightweight and extendable.

Thanks! 🙂

[Matt]

I wanted to clear up any popular myth that people believe. A site with lots of plugins is actually NOT automatically bad. The number of plugins your site also isn’t the most important thing. The way GeneratePress has structure itself in a modular fashion is excellent. It does things the “”WordPress Way”.

Plugins are for functionality and to promote modularity. Several small plugins are always better way to go than two big ones or a single huge one. Thinking that the sheer number of plugins alone is slowing your site down is probably more psychological than anything. Often times, shared hosting is more to blame than the plugins. If it’s not the host, it’ usually the theme and then the plugins after that. Thankfully, there’s GeneratePress to save people from the horrible all-in-one theme monstrosities available for purchase.

However, if the majority of your plugins are poorly coded, overly feature packed (aka bloated), etc then you’ll likely run into issues like performance degradation, etc. Due to ignorance this is often attributed to the number of plugins installed alone. It’s more of a matter of code quality and plugin weight though rather than the number of them you have installed.

If you aren’t savvy enough to discern which plugins are slowing your site down then this plugin might be helpful to you – https://wordpress.org/plugins/p3-profiler/

[Tom]

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Matt! Perfectly explained 🙂

[Laura Brown]

Plugins are getting more risky to use. I never really thought about how many plugins I was trying out. I am easily amused and plugin shopping is a cheap hobby.

Just this month my web host contacted me (twice) about spam being sent from my sites. I wasn’t sending anything and I do have some security, keep everything updated and backed up (more or less). My web host said it was likely a plugin, code added to the plugin in order to spam. I don’t know the details but it did stop once I removed all the plugins I wasn’t really using. The host told me just deactivating them does not stop them from spamming. I hadn’t known that.

I do know that plugins posted to WordPress do not get checked over and tested the way themes do. They should. I don’t know why themes are treated differently than plugins. People may think a plugin they get from WordPress is safe, but there is no such thing. They are just as much a risk as something you download from any other site.

I trust JetPack, the worst it has are glitches and bugs which tend to get fixed. I trust Tom’s GP add-ons because they work with the GP theme and he is pretty accountable and active in supporting and maintaining his plugins as well as the theme. A few other plugins I have used for years and I can see the developers in the WordPress forums, active and not just a flash in the pan. But, I’m far more careful about the plugins I try now. I think you can have too many plugins and you have to be aware of what you have installed or downloaded. Every time you get a glitch chances are good it’s a plugin you recently installed.

[Tom]

It’s definitely important to look at when the plugin was last updated, who the author is, and what the ratings are. Also always look in the support forum to make sure the author cares about the plugin. There’s a lot of good developers on WordPress.org, but there’s definitely some bad ones.

The WordPress Theme Review group is awesome, but they’re volunteers and the queues are pretty huge (even to release updates). The plugin directory is even more busy, so there’s probably not enough volunteers for them to do full reviews on the plugins unfortunately.

That being said, if a plugin/theme has a decent amount of downloads, and looks like it has a dedicated author who has good reviews, you’re probably in the clear 🙂

[Author]

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