One of the best features WordPress has is the ability to add plugins to your installation, this also comes to be a curse sometimes. This is true and worst if the plugin depends on some other third party website or software, if something doesn’t connect right you wont be able to see your own site sometimes.
The most recent example about this behavior I experience it today, one of my plugins couldn’t reach Twitter and an error page prevented others from seeing my site. This is a very bad thing to have you go through since the point of having plugins on your site is to increase functionality for your users. See attached image for error sample.
There should be a solution for this, one thing I had in mind was to replace the code for a message that explains that certain features are temporarily disable, as opposed to simple have an error message. This is also good for ads, if an ad becomes unresponsive then a message box explaining the error should show up on its place. I’ve seen how this work on production sites, big html sites like non-WordPress news sites.
I will be working on finding an good way to apply this concept, in the meantime, it would be awesome to have our developers thinking on adding similar functionality to their plugins. It’s better to bypass a plugin by default rather than letting WordPress display error codes that means nothing to the user. Please share you input or ideas with us, thanks for stopping by.
I added back this plugin on my site, the developer fixed tweeterstream and now we are rocking baby.