Edit Flow Lives, New Update Fixes Bugs and Improves Performance

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.