To be clear, I am the only person that was working on gPress, and did so in my spare time. At the time of starting development on it, I had a dead-end job and ample spare time. Since then, I got married, had a kid and found a job that is truly fulfilling, where we are currently developing our own OpenSource NoSQL CMS system – http://mongopress.org
Like any community, there are a lot of good folk, but with any community as large as this one, there are also lots of undesirable unappreciative idiots. In all my time where I was actively developing gPress, I only ever had one truly helpful support request, where most of my “support” time was spent asking people to confirm if it was a conflict with one of their other plugins or a non-standard theme they were using (which about 90% of problems were). I mean; seriously, try to be more active in your bug reports – investigate and play with the code and try to give a developer a helping hand, even if just pointing him or her towards a possible fix – this stuff is OpenSource, you have it at your fingertips and can help change the world! I was once contacted on Christmas day practically ordering me to stop what I was doing and help fix some site where my plugin conflicted with one of the other 600 plugins that they had installed. I’ve had vicious and depressing emails, repetitive DMs and and all kinds of nonsense from people with very little if any appreciation. On top of that, my plugin was remove twice from the repository and my personal user account here across the WordPress network was even deleted once – with the only possible “official” explanation having been that it was more than likely an over-zealous contributor. All of this, coupled with the fact that I now have a family that I need to spend my precious time with has made it extremely difficult to continue working on things…
But that’s not without trying. I took on a few “geo-relevant” freelance projects that allowed for additional features to be added, and I even managed to sell the concept of my plugin to the new company I worked at, where we started developing a huge BuddyPress project that’s added a lot of stuff to the latest unreleased version (including geo-spatial polygon generation and proximity queries along with OpenStreetMap integration and enough funk to wet your pants all days long), and has even resulted in the development of 3 new “high-end” plugins that have also not been released. However, that project and our commitment to the WordPress community was put on hold at around the 80% completion mark when we started experimenting with MongoDB and quickly found an extreme distaste for anything based on the antiquity known as MySQL. Coincidentally, this was about the same time we started developing MongoPress.
When time permits, I will certainly return to this project – in some-shape or form, and in the meantime, my thanks to everyone that did have something positive to contribute, and will hopefully see you again on the otherside…
To all the trolls, “SO LONG, AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH” 🙂
