I’ve used and built plugins as well as data tiddlers for many years, but only recently started to think about plugins as an alternative mechanism for data tiddlers - for at least my particular use case.
I have multiple, similar use-cases, but here’s one:
In my project management wiki, I store information on my contacts. I have maybe a 300 contacts that are stored in there and reference regularly as part of my job. I however work at a company with 50,000 employees, and it’s useful to periodically see if any details about my contacts have changed. So, I’ve long needed a way to compare the details about my 300 contacts against the whole company directory (AD).
Doing a regular import of 50,000 new tiddlers on a temporary basis is quite slow as you can imagine - especially on a file-per-tiddler system like I use. It also slows down the whole wiki. So, I have typically used data tiddlers and helpers like @pmario 's key-values plugins to operate around this. To get my data into these tiddlers is copy/pasting HUGE blocks of text over. It’s a bit of a pain, but better than the regular import of 50,000 new tiddlers.
Instead, I recently tried packaging the 50,000 tiddlers as a plugin (via the import / rename process that @EricShulman has described elsewhere) and noticed that performance was surprisingly good. Import speed due to it being a single file was great, and much less / no noticeable wiki performance degradation from carrying the extra 50,000 shadow tiddlers - I’m assuming because most parts of TiddlyWiki ignore these by default - exactly what I want. But now I can “query” and operate with these with just a little all[shadows] prefix and I’m good to go - full filter functionality!
The last piece was figuring out how to build the plugin without first importing them - which I’m now doing using the script I outlined in the post I just made about TiddlyWikiR.
Anyways, just thought this might be interesting to someone else in a similar situation who wouldn’t have considered using plugins as an alternative to large data tiddlers.