WordPress 3 Plugin Development Essentials

Death to clippy: Use sensible configurations

One of the overlooked aspects of prerelease preparations is how you should set up your default configurations. Remember Clippy, the insistently annoying animated paperclip that greeted users when they opened older versions of Microsoft Word? Clippy was both well known and well hated, and that annoying little paperclip is a vivid representation of one of the most notorious failures of configuration defaults. What made Clippy so aggravating? By default, the user was assumed to be inept and in dire need of hand-holding at every turn. We have no objection to Clippy's existence—some people may actually want that kind of help—but it is absurd to think that the majority of users should be assaulted by his ...