In reply to Daan van den Bergh.

Thanks for sharing, Daan. It helps to be reminded I wasn’t the only one feeling that way about those things!

And, always love to hear about real world users, so glad that WP2Static served a purpose for you for a while!

I hadn’t really been aiming to be acquired (every so often, I’d dabble in trying to be more commercially appealing, but kept falling back to my Open Source ideals). Close friends often wanted me to take more advantage of potential revenue streams, especially when I was broke and living out of a backpack at times!

At the time of joining Strattic and eventual acquisition, I was still largely aiming at the GitHub users of the plugin and building in more developer-friendly extensibility options, like full WP-CLI support and ability for developers to create their own deployment or crawling addons. The past few years so a huge focus on code quality, along with the big rewrite from what is now maintained as “Static HTML Output” to current WP2Static. These things combined, really helped bring in great FOSS contributions from people like Viktor Szepe, John Shaffer, Matt Vanderpol, Maciek Palmowski and many more (I have some great looking PRs waiting for me to review now, even!).

Being wary of survivor bias, I’d hope this is a nice tale of following a passion and focusing on quality, which led to a great outcome in the end (or rather, a new beginning!).

I hope your plugins are doing well and please feel free to reach out to me or Strattic for any static site stuff in future. We’ve got some great eCommerce options for static sites now, like Snipcart (also super nice people!).