Stuttter Plugins Now Available on WordPress.org

The whole collection of plugins from John James Jacoby’s Stuttter project is now available on WordPress.org. Jacoby created Stuttter as “a conduit for rethinking WordPress from the outside in,” and started pushing the plugins to the official plugin directory a couple months ago.

During the first half of 2015, he worked full-time on WordPress’ sister projects (BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress), thanks to the successful funding of his independent IndieGoGo campaign. After completing this project, Jacoby returned to consulting via Flox where he had the chance to test and use the Stuttter plugins in production.

“It’s a way to independently test the waters for what we can do with it [WordPress], without deviating from its history, beauty, charm, and chutzpah,” Jacoby said.

“I was recently inspired by Jeremy Felt’s post about what he looks for in plugins that he would want to use. We’ve chatted about it before, and he finally put it into words. Stuttter sticks to those philosophies (no nags, no licenses, nothing to cut out, etc…),” he said.

The new Stuttter profile on WordPress.org is home to 18 lean plugins, each carefully chiseled to do one thing well.

“My end goal is to point most public facing links for each plugin to a product on store.flox.io (using Easy Digital Downloads) and sell them for a few pennies, and then use WordPress.org for updates and distribution,” Jacoby said. “That way people get a zip of a plugin they purchased and get to ‘own’ their copy, plus I have a record of their purchase on flox.io so they can use that plugin on their hosted networks eventually too.

Jacoby plans to make the Stuttter plugins available on Flox for the communities hosted there.

“Many of them will be on by default, like WP Chosen and WP Pretty Filters,” he said. “Others will be ‘unlocked’ through purchases, like User Activity and User Parents.

“The goal is to strike a balance between a good default experience, and letting people upgrade through purchases, and then being able to take those purchases with them if they decide to self-host eventually (vs. losing them like on wpcom),” Jacoby said.

Developers who are interested in the code can find the Stuttter plugins publicly mirrored on Flox. They are actively developed there and then pushed out to GitHub in bulk.

“Almost all of these are ideas I’ve been imagining in one way or another for years, particularly WP User Profiles,” Jacoby said. “I’ve wanted that for BuddyPress forever, but it’s always been too big of a gamble to commit to something this drastic for a project like BuddyPress that is so well established.

“I think whenever you have a long time to imagine what life would be like once something is possible, you can execute very quickly once it is. Most of the current generation Stuttter plugins came rapid-fire because of several years of thought about them first. I hadn’t even done much research into alternatives (the Stream plugin vs. WP User Activity for example, and WooCommerce has its own Term Meta tweaks too). I just knew I wanted to solve a certain problem in a certain way, and had the time and motivation to make it happen,” he said.