Best Practice Addon Strategy?

[slowreflex]

What is the best practice addon strategy? Do addons slow the system down? Do addons make upgrading more painful? Do addons add security risks? Are there "must have" addons? Are there certain authors to stay away from? Are there any other negatives to having certain addons? Is there a way to prevent add-on conflict by following a certain strategy?

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with these questions. Just looking for what people's strategy and approach is to choosing which addons to have or not.

Thanks,

-slowreflex

 

[Paul B]

This thread needs to be moved to the add-on discussion forum but only licensed customers can post there.

Please associate your forum user name with your license, if you own one.

 

[Chris D]

People will have different opinions ranging from "I install everything I see", to "I never install anything".

It's all a matter of personal preference.

There is a gradual preformance hit for some add-ons you may be installing. But, this makes perfect sense. After all, many add-ons include database queries and such like.

There's no particular authors to avoid - just keep an eye on the last few pages of the support discussions of the add-ons and the reviews. That will soon tell you whether the author is active in supporting the add-on, whether people are having bad experiences etc.

Add-on conflicts are generally quite rare but can be resolved usually quite easily.

 

[slowreflex]

This thread needs to be moved to the add-on discussion forum but only licensed customers can post there.

Please associate your forum user name with your license, if you own one.

Purchasing one next week, which is why I'm asking questions like this to prepare. I'm trying to get a site up as quickly as possible, so am gathering people's opinions on what their approach is. You can move it if you want. I don't mind reading only until next week.

 

[Paul B]

Broadly speaking, the answers are it depends what you want out of your forum and how well the add-ons are coded.

There is no catch all answer as every forum is different and there are developers of all skill levels.

Having said that, problems with add-ons are few and far between and most developers will fix any bugs or incompatibilities that they are notified of.

 

[Deepmartini]

How many addons are too many to add? Will a site run smooth with 50 addons? 100? Or is there a limit?

 

[Chris D]

There are no hard limits.

I've known sites install over 100 add-ons. In theory 1000 add-ons is possible. It depends what the add-on does whether or not it will affect performance. If an add-on simply modifies some template code it should have little to no impact. If an add-on adds a basic query then it should also have little impact. If an add-on runs many queries or even just few "expensive" queries then performance could be affected.