Chad on Movable Type Plugins

Chad Everett's another popular Movable Type plugin developer who's considering the cost not just of developing plugins, but in supporting them as well. In a thoughtful post on his blog, where he says, "Add all that time together, and the development of the plugin is definitely not the great consumer of time. It's what I'll call the 'support' of the plugin."

One of the reasons we've been encouraging the ecosystem of services and support around plugins to grow (whether paid or free) is the increasing recognition that Movable Type's professional user base is willing to pay for quality code and support. In many cases, the paid commercial use of a plugin or application can let a developer afford to make a free personal version of the application available, in much the same way as Movable Type itself.

Whether a developer's work is supported by a day job, consulting work, or charging for the plugin or code that they've created, the more support that developers get to focus on their work, the better tools and technologies we all get to work with.