Back when I started writing WordPress plugins, the Open Source communities were small and specific. The programming world hadn’t fully evolved from posting zip files on forums to collaborating on GitHub. In fact Git was still in very early adoption and code under version control was almost always using SVN. At first I was just storing the code files on a file server and pushing them to websites using FTP. I stumbled across SVN while looking for a better way to track code changes and started using it for everything.
Continuous Deployment had not yet hit the scene which meant releasing code changes was a manual process of pushing files to production using and FTP client. Deploying code in this way is laughable today but at the time it was standard practice.
I was writing plugins at work for common features used across client websites. It was nice to have a plugin to copy and paste into a project, but after a while updating all the sites was getting to be cumbersome. I needed a way to easily update the plugin across many sites. This brought me to the WordPress plugin system.
The WordPress plugin system allows a plugin author to release plugin changes via SVN which are picked up by any WordPress site using the plugin. Pushing out a change is as simple as making a commit in the SVN repo then going to the WordPress admin and clicking “update”. Now updates were streamlined and reliable.
At the time I was simply publishing plugins to use by the company I worked at. I didn’t expect the greater community to use them too often. I published all plugins and supported them for free. 4.2 million downloads later, it seems some folks found my plugin’s useful.
An interesting side effect of publishing plugins was I started getting requests for custom plugins. It started out as a few small side projects then quickly turned into a full time job. Before I knew it, I had written hundreds of plugins of all types.