[wp-hackers] Discontinuing a plugin on WordPress.org

[Chip Bennett]

I have "adopted" three Plugins (one of which - thankfully - the primary
development was taken back over by the original developer). But what Otto
said is entirely correct: if someone wants to adopt a Plugin, just contact
the developer. From there, it's a simple matter of the developer entering
your WPORG username in the correct field on the Plugin's Admin page in the
Plugin Directory.

On a related note: I forked a Plugin a long time ago, and eventually, that
Plugin's functionality was entirely superseded by core functionality. The
Plugin had tens of thousands of downloads, so I couldn't simply stop
maintaining it, or blanking out the latest version in SVN. Instead, I added
information to the readme.txt explaining why the Plugin's functionality was
no longer necessary, then in a later version, I gracefully backed out the
Plugin's hooks, then in a much later version, removed the no-longer-hooked
Plugin functions:

http://wordpress.org/plugins/cbnet-ping-optimizer/

I had thought about asking the Plugin team to remove it, but since I still
see quite a bit of misinformation about the Plugin's necessity from time to
time, it seems to be more beneficial to leave it as-is.

So, that might be an approach worth taking for the OP's Plugin.


On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 10:18 AM, Otto <otto at ottodestruct.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at 7:50 AM, Nikola Nikolov <nikolov.tmw at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Ultimately I think that if there's a list of plugins that are no longer
> > supported by their authors and are put up "for adoption" by other
> > developers everyone could benefit(not sure if that's fair/possible?).
> Yes,
> > you can just fork the plugin and upload it as a new one, but the users of
> > the old plugin probably won't be aware that there's a new version of the
> > plugin.
> >
>
> LOL. Honestly, every time the issue of adoption comes up for plugins, I
> can't help but laugh a bit. :)
>
> Plugin adoption is not a real issue, because there is nobody out there
> actually wanting to adopt other people's code.
>
> Seriously, nobody wants to do it. People keep asking why there is no
> "for-adoption" list, and the answer is simply because it is not necessary.
> There's no shortage of abandoned plugins, but there's a serious shortage of
> caring wanna-be-parents for those plugins.
>
> I can think of maybe 10 times that a plugin has been adopted. Total. Ever.
> It just doesn't come up that often. The whole thing is a total non-issue
> because the truth of the matter is that no coder really wants to take over
> somebody else's code. It's a lot more fun to write your own code instead.
> And when you're doing things for free, "fun" is your primary purpose.
>
> If anybody wants to adopt a plugin and cannot get in touch with the author,
> you can email the plugins team and they will facilitate the process or make
> contact or whatever. But this virtually never happens. There's no need for
> a list because it's not like we're swamped with requests or anything.
>
> -Otto
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