PeepSo Leaves WordPress Plugin Repository

Matt Jaworski, Co-Founder of PeepSo.com, has announced that PeepSo is leaving the WordPress plugin repository. Moving forward, all updates for the plugin will be served directly from PeepSo’s servers. Explaining the decision, Jaworski expressed dissatisfaction with the repository, stating, “We have never been very happy with the WordPress repository, as we found their rules to be convoluted, poorly defined and too open for interpretation – that includes both the Plugin Guidelines and the way the support and review forums are moderated by them.”

Key Reasons Behind the Decision

He shared that several factors contributed to this move like learning recently that WordPress.org is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, as many assume, but is instead a private website managed by Matt Mullenweg. This, combined with unsettling actions by WordPress.org, such as banning developers, disabling plugin updates for client sites, and even taking over an entire plugin, led to a loss of trust. He noted, “We have thus lost our trust in the WordPress.org platform, the WordPress Foundation itself, and most importantly the man who seems to wield the ultimate power in the entire ecosystem.”

PeepSo was also suspended without a warning for issues that were already fixed. He explained,“There were a few cases where security researchers pentested our demo site, and found some minor issues. WP.org jumped on these and suspended our plugin, even though the issues were in our paid addons, or even third party software – NOT in the plugin hosted on WP.org. They have since apologized, but the issue of having our plugin suspended without warning stands – it affects our release cycle and our customers.”

“All that combined with the WPEngine drama led us to the decision to finally pull out of WordPress.org – WP.org hijacking a plugin from under the original devs was the final straw. That was the day we decided too pull the trigger and focused on removing the WP.org dependency from our business.”, he continued.

Moving Forward

Existing users of PeepSo will need to manually update the base plugin to version 7.0.0.0, after which all updates will be delivered directly from PeepSo’s servers.

Jaworski also hinted at potential changes to improve code organization and performance. “The Plugin Guidelines prevented us from putting premium code in the base plugin (paywalled) so we were forced to encapsulate paid features into separate plugins. There is an idea bouncing around of merging some premium code into the base plugin, and only enabling it based on the license type (free vs paid). This should lead to better code organization and performance improvements, but it’s just a general idea, likely not to be touched any time soon.”, he said.

After the ACF controversy, several plugin authors removed their plugins from the WordPress.org repository. Luc Princen, an eCommerce developer at Wooping, also shared on X that they weren’t going to put WPWooping’s new Shop Health plugin on the Repository and also published a blog post detailing the reasons.