PublishPress, makers of the PublishPress and PublishPress Blocks plugins, have adopted the Organize Series plugin from Darren Ethier. Organize Series is a 15-year-old plugin for organizing and displaying posts in a series, useful for novel writers, educators, magazine sites, and anyone breaking their longer content up into a series.
PublishPress is also adopting seven extensions for the plugin that add features like custom post type support, shortcodes, the ability to add a post to multiple series, bulk publishing, and more.
Ethier, who works as an engineer at Automattic, said he began losing interest in maintaining the plugin and knew it was time to search for a new owner.
“Most of you have noticed that I haven’t been actively contributing to Organize Series or it’s extensions for some time now and it’s been bugging me,” he said. “I’ve been gradually losing interest in maintaining the plugin as I’ve expanded my developer horizons and as a result, I’ve struggled with making the time to work on it.”
Ethier connected with PublishPress by describing his situation in a post on the Post Status community and agreed to transfer his plugin and extensions in exchange for a donation to a charity.
“Darren asked us to make a charitable donation as part of the handover,” PublishPress founder Steve Burge said. “We chose the American Journalism Project. Over 2,100 communities in the U.S. have lost their local newspaper since 2004. The AJP is trying to reverse that trend. It is a non-profit that is investing in local news. Their goal is to help grow newsrooms that hold the powerful accountable, combat disinformation, and deepen civic participation.”
Burge assured current users that the free version of Organize Series will remain free on WordPress.org with all of its current features and some improvements. The company will also keep the extensions freely available on GitHub but Burge said they plan to release a commercial version with updated versions of the extensions.
With the adoption of Organize Series, PublishPress now has nine plugins available in its niche collection of publishing extensions as part of its mission to “help WordPress publishers succeed.” In the near future, Organize Series’ website content will be transferred over and the company will be changing the plugin’s name to “PublishPress Series.”
I really appreciate you reporting on these acquisitions. I use this plugin on a site and would otherwise never know about the change.
Hope things don’t go sideways