WordPress.org plugins return
The Little Package free wordpress.org plugins are back up! The delay between when they were put back up and now should tell you just how buried I am. Thank you to my new friends who provided help with this – you know who you are!
It turned out the funnel from wordpress.org to my paid plugin offerings is REAL, and when WordPress shut me down, my income came to a halt. Generally February-April are bad months for online sales anyway, but I wasn’t anticipating crickets! And so I got busy and coded like… my income depended on it. The new version of Gift Wrapper for WooCommerce especially is improved. I hope folks jump on into version 5.1 ASAP, since it includes security updates. Against my better judgement I kept up with the CTA inside WordPress admin, soliciting folks to upgrade, review and maybe donate. I don’t like “begging,” but it shouldn’t hurt to ask! I also added in the Plus (paid) feature settings into the free plugin settings panels, albeit greyed-out stubs, to give people a sense of what they are missing by not upgrading. Really, for about $5 more than the plugin from WooCommerce “Gift Wrapper for WooCommerce,” you get a lot more features. People are going to head to WooCommerce to get their WooCommerce extensions but in my experience, that often isn’t where the best extensions are found.
Frankly there are so many Gift Wrap plugins for WordPress and WooCommerce that it makes choosing difficult. With upcoming version 5.0 of Gift Wrapper Plus I plan to offer a free 15-day demo of the plugin to make it easier to decide. I totally understand you can’t just “take my word for it.”
PDF Watermarking for WooCommercePDF Watermark (AKA “WaterWoo”) has been stable for quite a while, since really it’s just a bridge between the WooCommerce download link and the TCPDF library (similar to FPDF). Like the Gift Wrapper, the free version is robust enough that few people realize how much they’re missing not purchasing the upgrade. That’s fine. Concerns here involve the evolution of PHP and the fact that the TCPDF library is barely holding on. Thanks to involvement from a concerned outside developer, there have been more frequent commits to the “deprecated” TCPDF library. The author, Nicola Asuni, has been trying to write a new TCPDF, but has been busy and underfunded enough that we are stuck with the old library. The wordpress.org update for PDF Watermark brings compatibility up to PHP 8.0, but this is open source: we rely on you to report issues.
I know I personally love it when users report issues as they are discovered. I love it even more when they are detailed or offer to help fix them. I also like feature requests. Even if I were a daily user of these plugins, it’d be difficult to dream up all the possible ways they could be used. So again, I rely on users to be in touch with their needs and issues.
Anyway I mentioned concerns about the TCPDF library and PHP evolution, and now that I (sort of) have more time I will be getting back to a cool project I was working on before **it hit the fan. I’m excited for this development, and glad to have surmounted this momentary shutdown by WooCommerce/Wordpress.
(advertisement)