Chosen & Pretty Filters

In the past month I’ve released two WordPress plugins that I think ended up complementing each other rather nicely:

Together they make filtering posts in WordPress a much nicer experience:

Chosen + Pretty Filters

If you’re a plugin author that’s bundling the Chosen library or doing something interesting with post filters, I hope you’ll consider referring your users to install these instead.

Good plugins are small, purposeful, and they naturally blend into WordPress like bananas in a smoothie, but when you bundle libraries inside your large plugin, you will collide with other plugins that use that same library, and WordPress just isn’t designed to handle this very well quite yet.

Chances are, your plugin works great without Chosen. Users can still drop down a select box and type in it to find what they’re looking for, it’s just not a fancy experience. If you think your users would enjoy a fancy experience, maybe consider pointing them to WP Chosen instead, and update your plugin to support it and avoid the additional support burden while you’re at it.

P.S. All sites on Flox.io now have both of these active by default. <3


Comments

One response to “Chosen & Pretty Filters”

  1. Very nice! I really really really wish Chosen would work out its accessibility kinks so something like this could be made available in core.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but a plugin that bundles Chosen but registers it with the ‘chosen’ handle won’t conflict with WP Chosen, right? (I’m vague on the impact of different versions. Latest wins?) I don’t want to *require* users of one of my plugins to use WP Chosen, but I’d love to get out of its way when it’s installed.