WordPress Plugins: a blessing and a curse

All the power in WordPress comes from the plugins. The downside is that the “hooks” WP exposes to allow plugins to do their thing means that code changes you make might not work. For example, today I was trying to change the length of the excerpt for posts. Found this in the WP docs,

function new_excerpt_length($length) {
return 20;
}
add_filter('excerpt_length', 'new_excerpt_length');

I made the change. Nothing. Turns out someone had installed a plugin called, appropriately enough, Excerpt. It allows you to change the excerpt length through a slick UI, as well as many other options. Check it out here,

http://codex.wordpress.org/Excerpt