Twenty-four hours ago, the future of Edit Flow was unclear due to a lack of communication from the project’s maintainer, Automattic. Today however, the company pushed Edit Flow 0.8.1 to the WordPress plugin directory which is the same version that’s on GitHub. According to the plugin’s changelog, 0.8.1 includes the following:
- New German localization
- New Spanish localization
- Performance improvements for the calendar, custom statuses, and editorial metadata
- Bug fix: Show “(no title)” on the calendar when a post doesn’t have a title
- Bug fix: Persist the future date position of a post on the calendar when a post is updated
So why the sudden surge in activity? Philip John, VIP Wrangler for Automattic, stopped by and provided the following statement to the Tavern.
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.
This is welcome news to anyone who depends on the editorial workflow options provided by the plugin. While Edit Flow is a WordPress.com VIP project, the team is open to contributions from the community.
“We need to give folks a better structure for contributing and build confidence that their contributions will go somewhere,” Paul Maiorana, VP at Automattic who helps run WordPress.com VIP said.
Now that the team is rectifying the situation, those who showed interest in continuing its development are highly encouraged to submit pull requests or open new issues on the project’s GitHub page.
Jeff, thanks for pushing on this. I use EditFlow myself. It’s a fantastic plugin and I am friendly with Daniel, who originally co-created it out of a SUNY project he was working on in their journalism program. Glad you were able to shake some trees with your post and get some attention placed on this great plugin. I look forward to future developments!