Goodbye Cruel WordPress...

A few months ago I hung up my Wordpress-plugin shingle, ending 6 years supporting an open source plugin that never quite hit the big time. For a while, I hoped to turn it into a business. Make enough money to kick off a career in independent s/w development. But that was never to be. Monetizing a WordPress plugin is HARD. I know some manage to do it - more power to them, because I never managed much more than beer money.

Sell docs? "This plugin looks ok, but you have to buy documentation!! Why do I have to pay to find out how to use this crappy s/w?"

Sell add-ons? "This plugin is crippled. Why should I have to pay to get something that actually works!"

Sell support? "I can't believe the developer is asking for money to answer a simple question."

Sell dev services? "You want how much to develop an WP-Amazon-clone? I can hire a team from India for a fraction of that!"

And there's the rub. If you can't make money to compensate time away from family, shouldn't you be compensated with a little positive karma? I've worked on other projects and interaction with the OS community is mostly positive. The harshest form of criticism is someone forking your project, going in another direction. There's usually no recrimination in bug reports. On the other hand, the Wordpress review system? Broken. After an email-altercation with a competing plugin dev (who thought negative comments about his plugin were at my instigation - they weren't), my plugin rating went from an average of 4.5 to 1.5, when around 30 1-star ratings appeared in a week. A bit suspicious? Even when Automattic changed the rating system to require reviews, I don't think it's made a huge difference. They should have added a bug report system, rather than using their substandard forum.

With a community that borders on toxic, primitive project hosting, APIs that make it difficult to develop professional software (unit testing, anyone?), after 6 years, it's good bye WordPress. I'm not sorry to leave.