I was not looking at this post at all, but today, two Dev4Press plugins have reached the end of the road: GD Swift Navigator Pro and GD WebFonts Toolbox Pro, and this post will explain the reasons behind the decision.
Both plugins, GD Swift Navigator Pro and GD WebFonts Toolbox Pro were never great sellers, and while they did had their fair share of purchased licenses, and downloads from the club licenses too, both plugins never really took off. And, with that, the demand for new features was nonexistent, and the plugins remained as they are for years now.
But, low sales are never the only reason behind retirement. When it comes to GD Swift Navigator Pro, the feature it provided doesn’t have much sense in today’s modern web design, small screens use. While there are potentials behind the core idea, it would require a lot of work to remake the plugin and make it fit more into a modern website. And, in the future, if I do find time to do it, maybe that plugin will be released again. As for GD WebFonts Toolbox Pro, this plugin did provide a very useful feature at a time when themes were not as they are now. Now, every theme has typography settings that include web fonts, and it is hard to fit plugins like this one into Customizer for every popular theme or to make controls that will work with a few or more themes. The work needed to make the plugin easy to use with every theme (or at least popular themes), would be too expensive to do. Yes, the plugin had some features that go beyond the simple use of web fonts, but those features are very rarely needed, and again, not easy to use with the current trends of theme development. With the new Block related trends, the usability of this plugin is even more problematic. Investing a lot of time to reinvent both of these plugins would never pay off, and I would prefer to spend my available development time on plugins that are actually used, and that Dev4Press customers want to be developed further, and these two plugins were never that.
So, plugins are now in retirement mode, the latest versions can be downloaded from the user Dashboard, for anyone having access, and they will remain in the retirement stage until February 1, 2022, and will be removed after that. Forums for these plugins will remain open until that date.
Let me know what you think about this, and if you have any suggestions related to these plugins and their features.
