GD Products Center Pro plugin is retired today. It was the hard decision to make, and for the past few months, I have been thinking about this plugin and what can be done to keep it alive.
Since February, my office whiteboard was filled with the list of requirements for next major version of GD Products Center Pro. I was trying to calculate development time required to remake the plugin, improve the interface and bring it in line with all the other Dev4Press plugins, improve the core code for handling products data, create the API for connecting to eCommerce plugins or data sources, create new templates system to make the plugin responsive and easier to integrate into any theme.
And, no matter how I crunch the numbers, it would require 16 to 18 weeks of development time to do it all. That is a total dedication to this plugin for that time period without any extra time for other plugins or anything else Dev4Press related. To fit all the other things I have to do daily (support and maintenance consuming a lot of time), development would take close to 6 to 8 months working on GD Product Center Pro and only providing support on Dev4Press, with no other plugins getting any new version.
In the past 3 years, I have completely remade GD Press Tools Pro and GD Content Tools Pro (from GD Custom Posts and Taxonomies Tools Pro). The first plugin was even split into 3 plugins in the process, and it took about 2 months of development time, spread across 7 months period. And the second plugin took about 1 month of development time spread across 2 months period. And in many regards, GD Products Center Pro is a more complex plugin that in the same time requires more work to bring it up to date.
Investing so much time into the plugin that in the past wasn’t very profitable, is not viable for a small development studio especially if that means I have to neglect all other plugins that bring the money and have a much larger user base. The main reason behind the GD Press Tools Pro and GD Content Tools Pro remake were the fact that they had a lot of active users and investing time in these plugins made sense. Doing that for GD Products Center Pro is not even close to that.
So, here is what will happen:
- Starting today, August 1, 2017, GD Products Center Pro is in the final retirement stage.
- Plugin support forum is now moved to the Legacy Plugins forum category.
- If the users of GD Products Center Pro report any new bugs in the next 3 months, the plugin will get one or two bugs fixing updates.
- Bugs related to conflicts with other plugins will not be fixed.
- The plugin will be officially retired on November 1, 2017.
- All active licenses for the plugin will be set as retired but will be able to download the plugin after the retirement date.
- The plugin will remain available for download until December 31, 2018.
- All licenses will be changed to expire on December 31, 2018.
Is there a chance that plugin will be revived in the future? No, there is not. I really liked the plugin and I had a lot of fun developing it, but not every plugin is destined to be a success.
If you have any questions about the retirement process, please use the comments or the contact form.
Oh Millan! sad to see such a magnificent plugin being retired. GD product center is one of it’s kind, being a complex plugin, it was really easy to use and there was tons of customization options, backed by your outstanding support.
It’s one of my favorite WordPress plugin, being an early user of the plugin I have a huge connection with this plugin. One of the critical reasons, that this plugin might be failed to be a success because, most of the WordPress people never knew about it, as well as none of the WordPress blog, featured this plugin, neither a review about the plugin is covered by anyone.
Thanks for the comment!
In recent years it has become impossible to find a major WordPress news or plugins websites to write about premium plugins without charging a lot of money for so called ‘reviews’. Most of my plugins are doing well with social networks promotions and plugin users word to mouth promotion, and I am OK with selling less without paying for fake promotional reviews. I always appreciate honest reviews from my users (even the negative ones). And, in all that, GD Products Center Pro slipped through as unknown plugin, making the investment into its future development very problematic. If in the future things change, I would like to go back to this plugin in some form.
Absolutely agreed with your words, majority of WordPress blogs runs on paid review and this is not an ideal plugin or theme promotion method in my views, as well.
Not only, paid review it’s a waste of resource but, it also fails to serve the purpose of a review. The prospective buyer, never gets the honest verdict about any plugin, and it leads to an unsatisfied buyer.
I also planned to make a big guide on “how to create your own product comparison site using WordPress,” but I failed to compose it so far. And now, it seems that I’m too late.