Plugin Support…or lack thereof…

I am almost at my 1st year anniversary of using WordPress to build my business website. It has been a crazy ride with a ton of learning. There are a million ways to express a thought when creating a website and now there are wonderful plugins to reduce the need to become programming experts.

I feel that plugins are a great benefit but they also come with pitfalls. As WordPress versions change and more plugins co-exist…..the possibility of error increases. I have run into numerous cases of plugins that don’t quite do what they say they will and bugs being flushed out thanks to my website being a testing ground.

So, one could say that if I don’t like it, I should learn HTML and build everything from the ground up. It could also be said that nothing is perfect, and plugins are not guaranteed to work. It is an open community after all.

I truly hate when I post 5 problems to various plugin developers and there is never a response. I notice that if there is a question that relates to something they know is about to be fixed in the next release then it gets a response. Questions with answers in easily found places don’t get responses. Then there are real problems that just go ignored forever.

My problems, in my own opinion, have been simple things that i’d expect to work but don’t. Proper tabbing, underlines following text without straying….basic functions that normally work outside the plugin.

So I guess in the end, if it’s important enough, I might have to pay for it from an expert. My feeling is that I’ve paid enough and would welcome a more reliable approach to plugin support.

Am I the only one in this situation? Are there any experts out there that might have a suggestion or two about problem resolution as it relates to plugins and how to approach it?