Major changes coming soon to Dev4Press

In December this year, Dev4Press will celebrate its 15th birthday. Many changes will be made leading up to this anniversary, and the goal is to finish all the planned changes during the next 2025 year.

All the changes outlined here will be made in stages, and implementing everything will take the better part of next year.

Licensing Changes

For the past year, we have experienced various issues with our current payment processor that culminated in changes that affect our ability to stay in business and pay the bills on time. A few months ago, we had a SweepPress plugin integrated with Freemius as a test case of the whole process and test of the Freemius SDK integration and overall service. If you have purchased SweepPress via Freemius integration, updates to the plugin go through Freemius, and you have full access to the support forum on Dev4Press, too.

Over the next few months, more plugins will be getting Freemius integration, starting with those with Lite versions on WordPress.org. The goal is to have all Lite/Pro and Pro-only plugins integrated with Freemius and all new license purchases processed via Freemius. This will include the Club licenses, too. Until that process is done, the checkout pages will be Freemius-powered for some plugins and MyCommerce-powered for others.

There are no plans to migrate existing licenses to Freemius at this time. So, if you have a license purchased from MyCommerce, it will remain valid, and all active subscriptions will continue to go through MyCommerce. Once all the plugins are converted to Freemius, we may start the migration process and move all the licenses to a new platform, which is still at least a year or so away.

More about Freemius licensing

In summary, Freemius is a Merchant Of Record (MOR for short), just as MyCommerce is now. Freemius will handle any license bought through Freemius integration or the Freemius checkout page, and its SDK will be responsible for license activation, deactivation, and plugin updates. The licenses bought through Freemius will not be listed on the regular Dev4Press licenses panel but through the Freemius User panel integrated into the Dev4Press website account area. Once all the plugins switch to Freemius, we will consider changing all active licenses to Feemius.

The Freemius pricing structures will differ from the current system, and all plugins will not have monthly subscriptions, annual subscriptions, or lifetime licenses. The Freemius user panel will make handling license changes, renewals, deactivation, and reactivation of licenses and payments much easier.

Plugin Changes

Many plugins will undergo rebranding and name changes to align with our latest plugins and naming trends. Some will also be modernized and code updated to match our recent plugins. All plugins with the GD prefix will be renamed to lose the GD prefix. However, the plugin slug name will not change, so we don’t break compatibility with existing installations and cause update problems. GD Topic Polls is the first plugin to lose the GD prefix, and it was released a few days ago under the new name topicPolls for bbPress, followed by GD Topic Prefix Pro, renamed to topicPrefix Pro for bbPress.

The shared library used by all the plugins will also undergo significant changes. Currently used for the topicPolls for bbPress and SweepPress plugins, the new version of the library (5.2) switches to loading via composer, significantly improving the deployment and versioning process. For plugins that integrate with Freemius, that SDK will also be loaded via composer, which will again help with the versioning and integration process.

Updater Plugin

A new version of the Dev4Press Updater plugin is coming this week, with improvements related to Freemius licenses. The plugin will be able to recognize whether it is integrated with Freemius or not.

New and Updated Plugins

Dev4Press’s oldest plugin, GD Press Tools Pro, will soon be retired and replaced with two new plugins (one for Backups only, the other with many different smaller WordPress administration tools). More will be announced early next year. GD Content Tools, GD Mail Queue, and GD Rating System will undergo major rewrites next year. More effort will also go into the documentation.

More?

There are a few more ideas and plans for 2025, but at this time, it is too early to announce. For now, leave the comment below and let me know what you think about the upcoming changes.

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