A couple months back, some WP pals and I were sitting around at a WordCamp after party and chatting about supporting plugins and other related topics. My friend Justin has a premium plugin that he sells and was remarking on the fact that a number of his customers were consistently making feature requests…for features they already had. This had us all chuckling but the real joke of the evening came when someone suggested actually making another plugin which could be used as an addon to recommend to those customers but have the new plugin not actually do anything.

We all really got a big kick out of the concept of creating essentially a placebo of a plugin which could be used to pacify/satisfy customers/users who request already existing or perhaps nonsensical features.

Well, long story short, I thought the idea was so amusing that I did something like that this week. I threw together a functioning plugin that does essentially nothing and submitted it to the plugin repository, actually expecting it to get the thumbs down from the plugin review team. It was hastily thrown together solely for my own amusement so getting denied wouldn’t have been a big letdown for me.

But the reviewers did end up letting it through so I went ahead and published version 0.1 of Betterify.

Immediately after I shared a link on Twitter. Since then, I’ve been receiving some pretty awesome feedback and more downloads than most of my other plugins on their first two days. Plus, of course, lots of shared laughs with friends on Twitter.

Not sure at this point where this will go. So far, I’m just having a good time cracking myself up. It’s the little things in life.