Organ Donor Register – my first deleted WordPress plugin

Up until now I haven’t retried any of my plugins. However, there are a few I wish to – mainly wrapping their functionality into other plugins.

In the case of Organ Donor Register, however, it’s gone completely.

This plugin would add an image to your sidebar promoting the Organ Donor Register in the UK. You could click on the chosen image (there were a number to choose from) to visit the registration on their site.

I created this plugin as I am a big believer in their cause and wanted to make it easier for UK WordPress users to help in the promotion. Sadly, though, the NHS Organ Donation people thought otherwise. When creating the plugin I had some initial contact with them and they assisted me with the images – the intention was that they’d give their approval to my work and this would help in promoting it. After all my work however, they didn’t. Indeed, they stopped communicating.

13 months after releasing it the plugin has had just 253 downloads.

My wife used to work for a chemicals company who supplied many of the larger charities who were doing medical research. She found that they had so much money they stopped caring about ensuring that every penny of donations were spent wisely – if they were accidentally charged twice they wouldn’t even notice and rarely even seemed bothered. My wife stopped donating to them after this and, instead, gave to local charities, for example hospices. I wonder if this is the same for NHS Blood & Transplant (as they are now called – again, spending money on regularly changing their name seems to be a clue as to how wise they are being with our money). Of course, in this case, NHSBT are not a charity but part of the NHS, paid for by the UK tax-payer. Still, the same applies as they are asking for people’s assistance to help with promotion.

In fact, when they publish newsletters and refer to them as “stakeholder newsletters” then you know they’ve been over-come with business babble and general nonsense.

Anyway, I decided to stop supporting it and, the easiest way to ensure this, was to remove the plugin from WordPress.org.

The first thing I did was remove all the code from the SVN archive. Next, I sent an email to plugins@wordpress.org requesting the plugin be removed from the repository – although the code no longer exists, the plugin will still appear on the site until this is done. Now it’s gone. Totally.

Tags: NHS, NHSBT, Organ Donor Register, Plugin, Wordpress

Category: Wordpress