Plugins

Dev4Press most successful premium plugins without a doubt are GD Press Tools and GD Custom Posts And Taxonomies Tools. Both plugins went through several major releases and got tons of new features  and they are absolutely most powerful tools in its class available for WordPress. GD aZon FUSION is a new plugin that is still in Beta phase, and will soon get first stable release. GD Affiliate Center development was a bit slower, but many more exciting features will be added to the plugin in the next couple of months. GD Simple Widgets development was also slower, but 3.0 version is already in works. With work continuing on GD Star Rating 2.0, next year will be very busy.

xScape & Themes

Most important development project this year on Dev4Press is creation of xScape, the most advanced theme framework for WordPress. Over the past 9 months xScape went through several major releases and countless number of features are added. xScape offers several unique features that allow you easy layout manipulation, ads integration, several modules and many widgets to use.

So far 7 themes are created, 3 of them are designed by my friend Vladan Vasic (Peexon Design), and he will contribute few more designs in the next year. I am in talks with 2 more designers to contribute few more themes in 2011.

Publishing

More than 70 tutorials are published on Dev4Press in 2010, and almost 200 other posts regarding development, releases and updates. Documentation Central is growing with some 80 entries available so far. About half of tutorials are videos and that similar trend will continue next year. As the Dev4Press premium users already know, many tutorials published in the recent months are requested by them, so if you need something made into the tutorial, feel free to leave a request in the forum.

Forum & Support

Over 200 topics and almost 1000 posts in the forum are best starting place to get premium support for themes, plugins and WordPress. Also, almost 100 premium support email tickets are opened by premium users, and all solved successfully. Most of them were for GD Star Rating premium support.

I am very grateful for the constant support for all the premium users on Dev4Press. We still don’t have a huge user base, but it’s growing, and your influence on the development progress is simply great: ideas for new features and help in finding bugs are immeasurable and there are still many suggestions that will be added to both plugins and themes in the coming months. I will always try to incorporate most (if not all) ideas into the development process and provide features that users need the most.

Final words…

So, 2010 is ending today, and I must say that I am very satisfied with the work done this year, and I can promise that intense development will continue in 2011. I wish to all Happy New Year!

For a Weblog post and all the comments (including several I made) check out their post:

Trend for 210 – Paying for plugins: http://dv4p.com/hc

So, why should you pay for plugins? Or themes for that matter? For years most of the plugins (with very, very few exceptions) for WordPress were available for free. The same goes for themes, but about year and a half ago that changed, and several designers and developers decided to release so called premium themes and change for them. And during this year they modified their business model to include the GPL for the themes and practically shift focus to support for the themes. And from what I can see, that concept works great and more and more themes are in fact premium themes. And they are, no doubt about it, much, much better from the most free themes (with very few exceptions). Key word in all that is again support, and free themes are basically provided without any support at all (again with very few exceptions).

And, for the past year I use only premium themes, mostly from Woothemes or ElegenatThemes, and this site is made on the base of The Station theme from Woothemes. I don’t mind paying for quality, for fast support, after all all that takes time, and in the end that is not free.

In the past several months we have witnessed the same thing starting with plugins, with few developers started charging for their plugins. With launch of the WPPlugins website we got first payed plugins market. I am not going to talk much about WPPlugins website, but there are many things that are wrong with the way they work and is actually against my idea of how premium plugins should be provided to the end users.

Main reason I decided to start this new Dev4Press and launch several premium plugins is the fact that providing quality support for plugins takes a lot of time, and in the end I don’t have so much free time aside the freelance projects I work on.  It all started with GD Star Rating, and I really tried to provide as much help as I could with tutorials, documentation forums, and after all that users wanted more. So i tried to help on the individual basis by taking on some minor integration projects. And that was successful, but still idea is to have support that can be widely used. And after a while, I made several more plugins I provided for free, and they also have grown and again support became a problem.

So, I decided to stop with free support. If I can’t provided quality free support, than I will not do it, simple as that. And I expanded some of my plugins with additional features that will available only with Pro versions, even written one new plugin (Pro only), and I plan to dedicate most of my time to making WordPress plugins and provide the best quality support I can. Also, all plugins are available with few different packages that have different prices allowing users to find what is best for them.

And why the payed, or premium support is better solution? Imagine that you are building a site for a client (and you are payed to do it), and you are using a free plugin with free (and very limited) support. And, at one point, this plugin breaks down (no regular updated, or bug fixes). Your whole website is not in problems. You can try to replace it or fix it yourself, but that is not usually that easy. Best way is to contact author of the plugin and ask for support. In most cases even if you get response from the author, it will take maybe even weeks. And what you are going to say to your client: hey, this plugin broke, and I need to wait for the support, so we need to delay website for few weeks. Hell no! You will try to find someone to fix it as soon as possible, and you will pay a lot for that. It would be much cheaper if the plugin has premium support.

Just for fun, contact authors of each of the plugins you are using on your blocks (maybe 30 of them). I am sure than at least half of them will not respond at all. A third will respond after a week or two, and maybe 4-5 will respond sooner. But almost no one will be able to help you exactly when you need help. And that’s why is good to have premium plugins around, and give users a choice to pay for the quality. And labeling pluign as premium doesn’t mean that support will be any better, and that’s something all developers need to work on, to raise the quality and to justify the payments and really help their clients.

What you will get from Dev4Press if you decide to buy our plugins (and soon themese)? Regular updates, nightly builds and quick bug fixing releases, premium support forum, email support (development subscriptions), tutorials (both text and video) and extensive documentation. And on top of that, you will be able to influence the development using suggestions box and follow regularly updated roadmaps for all plugins. And be sure that I will release at least 3 new plugins in 2010, and two of them are already in the planning stages.

So, to summarize, paying for quality support is something that will definitively happen, and next year will be critical for this new business model for our beloved WordPress. Tell me what you think.