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Why I Love (and now hate a bit) WordPress

markb

October 9, 2024

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I recently had a distasteful experience with the plugin developers at WCvendors (more about that later), making me fear the worst for the future of WordPress. A plugin adds extra functionality to your WordPress site. There are thousands of them, and generally, there will be a plugin (3rd party code) already built for what you want your website to do. That’s why I love it. Take a look at the plugin repository for yourself here. For example, Woocommerce is a plugin that adds shop functionality to your WordPress site. The WCvendors plugin adds extra functionality to the WooCommerce plugin.

Plugin Business Model

The plugin business model is generally freemium, and it’s a good model. I have purchased many plugins after trying out the free versions, deciding “yes,” this is what I want, and upgrading to the pro version. Once you upgrade, you are into the subscription model, and up until recently, your plugin and website would still work even if you postponed re-subscribing.

Threshold

However, WCvendors have crossed this threshold, They have removed the functionality of previous versions of their plugin, so you are forced to purchase their latest*. This stopped my website from functioning as intended. At the time of writing, my plugin version is 1.8.5, which no longer works, and you need version 1.8.8. They want $199.

Ostensible

When Apple confirmed slowing older devices down, they claimed it was to protect components, however, it was revealed to be intentional for other reasons. WCvendors claim it is a compatibility requisite to ensure smooth operation, which I’m sure they believe on some level. I do not begrudge them for a living, and I genuinely like them as developers. Their work ethic is strong, but this feels wrong, exploitative, and a false premise only used to secure resubscription money. 

Ransomware Model

However, my choice and the plugin’s functionality have been removed, which is unacceptable and needs to be highlighted. This is not the model I signed up for. If I don’t keep paying you $199  a year, we will remove all functionality. I do not agree with it, and frankly the $900 give or take I’ve spent over the years I want back. If I were to include the countless hours of bugs we helped the developers identify, it would be a lot more, not to mention the mammoth amount of work I must go through to migrate data and find another plugin with similar functionality. I had all those headaches when the plugin launched, and the support we gave to the developers was incredible. Check out the old forums and see for yourselves. Edit* access to the old forums is no longer possible and redirects to their new forum which conceals all our bug reports.

Open Source – continuous development.

For your understanding, I’m not advocating running outdated plugins. The downside is that those plugins could potentially have flaws, lose compatibility with the core WordPress coding (which is always being worked on and updated), or expose security issues – not forgetting that you are entitled to support during your subscription, which sometimes is invaluable.

The open-source WordPress platform has created jobs and incomes for many developers. It also displays many of the blogs and websites you all use daily. If all the plugin developers started forcing resubscription payments and stopping their previous versions from working, I reckon many websites would not function the same overnight. However, I think this is more of a legal discussion. Do not allow developers to exert this form of control over their customers. It’s a ransomware model that I fear the developers will go down.

Now, it’s time to go through the laborious process of finding another plugin to do the job I want.

*update – I forgot to mention that if you downgrade the parent plugin in this case woocommerce the old version will work. It is NOT something I want to be forced to do.

*Edited 7th October 2024.

After the recent revelations from WordPress founder regarding other businesses profiting on the top of their platform. I rejigged this post to read a bit better.