Earlier this year, we asked Automattic what’s going on with Edit Flow, an editorial workflow plugin for WordPress that the company acquired from Daniel Bachhuber, a former Automattician.
Mark Armstrong, who represents Automattic, said the plugin is an active project used on many VIP client sites. However, the fixes implemented on the project’s GitHub account were not synchronized with the version hosted on WordPress.org leaving users wondering if the plugin was abandoned.
Within the comments of our article, Philip John, a VIP Wrangler at Automattic, commented on behalf of Automattic apologizing for the lack of communication.
Folks, we’re sorry that it looks as though we’ve abandoned Edit Flow. We certainly haven’t, and we should have at least updated the tested tag for the plugin as you rightly point out. We’ve done that today, as well as make sure GitHub and WordPress.org are in sync.
Internally I’m working on an effort to make Automattic better at maintaining our own plugins. We want to avoid this situation as much as we can, and I promise we’re trying. Thank you for calling us out on this. Let’s see what we can all do about getting some attention for Edit Flow.
The team recently pushed out Edit Flow 0.8.2 and published a short blog post announcing its release. According to the changelog, 0.8.2 fixes a number of bugs and contains several improvements to localization and internationalization.
Long time readers will know that I’ve been vocal about a frustrating bug we encountered with Edit Flow and the WordPress for iOS mobile app. I’m happy to report that after thorough testing, the issue is fixed. Users can now edit published posts using Calypso or the WordPress mobile apps without comments being disabled.
During testing however, I encountered an instance where editing a post in the mobile app changed the time stamp of when the post was published to reflect the time of editing. After a half hour of testing, I was unable to duplicate the issue but it’s something mobile app users should keep an eye on.
If you’re having issues with Edit Flow, I highly encourage you to update to 0.8.2 as it may fix them. If you encounter new bugs or need to report a problem, users are encouraged to create a new post in the plugin’s support forum. Developers interested in contributing to the plugin can do so via GitHub where pull requests are welcomed.
Thank you for testing!