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I think you're missing two things: (1) there are clients who demand administrative access, and since they pay the bills, they get it (2) maintainability. As much as I detest WordPress, and as garbage as many of the public plugins are, what would be even worse is having my team take over support for one of your sites with your custom plugins. Ramp up cost is a very real thing.

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I suppose so. I like to think my custom plugins are well written and maintainable. I attribute this to the fact that I identity as a JavaScript engineer with some classic OO tendencies (shout out to Gilfoyle). More or less I write JavaScript and Java/C# so I'm not some dipshit writing WordPress plugins w PHP/Wordpress as my first and only language and framework.

The nicest plugin I've seen [code wise] is the Jasig CAS authentication plugin, and for that I had to modify it to specify the behavior I wanted (custom 500, 501 screens, don't upsert user). So, whenever an update comes around I have to either ignore it or modify the code. Honestly, I think that's even against the license since I didn't publish my changes.

Absolutely - and by the way, I was in no way knocking you or your code! The level of polish or viability of a custom plugin for us would just be secondary to the fact that it was custom to begin with - that's all I was trying to get across.

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