Warnings and errors

A couple of the more popular plugins are over the top and add too much stuff. I just wanted a “Duplicate” link. I gave this plugin a try, and was not impressed.

1. After installing the plugin I received a warning about unexpected characters being output. This was nothing to worry about, but makes me question how well this plugin is written: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/elasticbeanstalk-us-west-2-868470985522/ShareX/2017/09/chrome_2017-09-28_21-59-25.png

2. This plugin adds a menu page to set up a suffix. Features are great, but if you only have one feature… why not just get rid of it? There are more robust plugins out there. Needless fluff, with some poorly designed backend pages (A red header? really? and what’s with the border around the fields?): https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/elasticbeanstalk-us-west-2-868470985522/ShareX/2017/09/chrome_2017-09-28_22-01-07.png

3. Finally on to a more important issue. When actually duplicating a post, an error occurs. It still duplicates, but this error probably means some custom fields haven’t had a chance to save if the error occurred before the fields were saved: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/elasticbeanstalk-us-west-2-868470985522/ShareX/2017/09/chrome_2017-09-28_22-02-59.png

The one thing this plugin does correctly is that it adds a “Duplicate” button to the post action links. No other clutter. I think this plugin should go the simplistic route – fix the errors, and remove that options page. The suffix feature isn’t really useful, is it? When would you ever want to keep the generated suffix? Leave that to a more bloated plugin.