This sort of thing frustrates me to no end:
Ms. Bates, your carefully chosen words say volumes.
Not to confuse people with the facts, but not only does Twitter Tools give you fine grain control over your decision to send (or not send) each post to Twitter, it even has a feature that prevents posts from being tweeted if they were published before you installed Twitter Tools. Could there be a bug? Sure (though it’s unlikely that I wouldn’t have heard about it before now), but that’s not really the point is it?
The “don’t tweet old posts” feature was added in version 1.2b1 back in 2008. It was added solely because people requested it; it certainly wasn’t something I needed – just trying to make things better for the WordPress community.
Of course for every group of people you satisfy by adding a feature, you’ll have an equal number of people requesting the opposite:
The joys of building software and giving it away for free.
The irony of course is that I was getting set to start coding on a rewrite of Twitter Tools this evening (since there is a deadline looming), but comments like the ones above really take the wind out of my sails.
The combination of an evolving set of best-practices in WordPress core and extremely high expectations from the WordPress user community has plugin developers in a tough spot these days.
I hired someone this summer for the sole purpose of updating all of our publicly released plugins/themes from the best practices of the time to the best practices in WP 3.0 (along with a few added features, bug fixes and enhancements). That’s the entire job. I expect it to take about 4-6 months to update the ~30 plugins/themes in question.
That’s an expense I decided we should take on for the good of the community. The cost of the developer’s salary alone is way more than the total donations received on all of the plugins (over a 5-6 year period) – not to mention the time spent creating them in the first place, updating them, etc.
There are many things in the WordPress community that are great. There are also many things that need to continue to evolve and improve.
Enough ranting, I’ll go back to working on something more productive…
This post is part of the project: Twitter Tools. View the project timeline for more context on this post.