Cancel

Sarah Gooding

Shopify Discontinues Its Official Plugin for WordPress

Shopify’s official plugin for WordPress was removed from the plugin directory this week. The plugin allowed users to create “Buy Buttons” for products from their Shopify stores and insert them into WordPress posts and pages using a shortcode. It was built by WebDevStudios and had approximately 9,000 active installations before it was removed.

Shopify’s documentation says the plugin has been discontinued and will not be supported after June 30, 2017. WordPress users who want to display Shopify products on their sites are now instructed to create a Buy Button for a product or collection and paste the embed code into WordPress instead.

The WordPress plugin team would not comment on why the plugin was removed, but a support representative from Shopify said it was outdated and difficult to maintain.

“The reason it was removed is that it was being replaced by Buy Button, which is a better way of selling in WordPress,” Shopify customer support representative Jacquelyn Failano said. “The WordPress plugin was built by a third party and even if we support it, it could break at any time as we make future updates to the Buy Button channel.”

Failano said that by switching from using the plugin to creating Buy Buttons with Shopify, users will have access to updated features, including fonts, colors, layouts, buttons, and multiple images on variants. Merchants will also be in a better position to take advantage of future updates.

“The plugin uses older code and methods that will no longer be updated or supported,” Failano said. “There is no longer a dedicated development team for it. This means that there are no resources to maintain or rebuild the plugin.”

Failano would not confirm whether or not the plugin was removed from the directory by Shopify at the company’s discretion or whether it was forcibly removed by WordPress for a violation of the guidelines.

“I’m afraid I cannot confirm on that part – the main reason why it was discontinued was because the plugin uses older code and methods that will no longer be updated or supported,” Failano said.

Category: ,
Tags:
16

16 responses to “Shopify Discontinues Its Official Plugin for WordPress”

  1. It would have been better if they had simply converted the plugin a shortcode that will make embedding the Buy buttom easy in WordPress TinyMCE editor.

  2. The chain of discontinued services is slightly growing.
    AdSense, Shopify, Internet explore, WP San Francisco offices and all.
    Hope WordPress itself will not be discontinued…

    • Technically the Adsense plugin was not discontinued it sort of gave way to QuickStart so the plugin was deemed unnecessary. IE gave way to Chrome I mean eer er Edge.

  3. Generating code is annoying and a bit pedestrian. Woo-commerce it is then.

  5. Hey everyone,

    I’m currently developing a plugin that will be integrating Shopify directly into WordPress. Unlike the official plugin that was just discontinued, I won’t be using iFrames to display the products or collections.

    I’m using the Shopify API directly and combining it with the Buy Button channel for the front-end. This gives the end user full control over how they want to show their products — especially if you’re a WP developer.

    Anyway for the sake of brevity I won’t go into too much detail, but if you want to learn more feel free to check out the project here: https://wpshop.io

    The planned release is around the end of May. I’m also currently sending out alpha versions if you want to start trying it out.

    https://wpshop.io

    Cheers!
    Andrew

      • I thought so too until I tried changing the CSS of the products for a client heh. Integrating the API has been a ton of work so my guess is they needed to get something out quick.

    • Nice! I had planned for something similar to what it sounds you’ve built (are building) last summer but client kiboshed the project due to supplier and manufacturing problems. Yeah I wanted to build something that would just pull the shopify api and relate it to products in a new CPT and cache the F out of it. Sounds like you’re doing something similar. I signed up for the email list and stared it on GitHub. No need for it right now but it’s good to see somebody’s on top of this one. Cheers

      • Awesome thanks Chuck.

        Totally with you on the caching as-well. I originally saved the product and collections data in the post_meta table but then realized that I was massively limited to what I could query since many of the options were saved as serialized arrays. I’ve since moved to custom tables approach but now need to handle all the caching myself. Once I get the caching finished I think it’ll be super nice.

    • Thanks for sharing what you are working on. WP Shopify looks awesome. Looks like it will be much better replacement for a discontinued official plugin.

  6. The plugin team will never disclose why a plugin is removed from the directory, under any circumstances. It’s not our plugin, we don’t own it, it’s not our place to speak on that matter.

    We do remove a lot of plugins by author request. Several every week. We also remove them for security issues, and bring them back once those issues are fixed. We also remove for guideline violations. Those come back if they fix the violations.

    But, again, these are not our plugins, and so we are not in a position to point fingers for any reason. We don’t judge or attempt to shame people. We work with authors and do what we feel to be best in each individual circumstance.

    So, stop asking why. It’s distracting. ?

You may also like

Newsletter

Subscribe Via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

%d bloggers like this: