When we were planning the release of our new WooCommerce plugin Shop Health a few months ago, all of us expected that we would be launching it on Word

Why we’re not releasing on wp.org… yet

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2024-11-14 04:00:04

When we were planning the release of our new WooCommerce plugin Shop Health a few months ago, all of us expected that we would be launching it on WordPress.org as a regular free plugin.

The reason we wanted to distribute it for free was simple: we came across so many WooCommerce shops that were having problems with their content and settings — things that were easily fixable as long as you knew where to look. In order for this plugin to have the greatest impact, it would need to be free.

While we were finishing up the last parts of Shop Health, however, trouble was brewing in the WordPress and WooCommerce ecosystems. Trouble that would cause us to not release on WordPress.org at all and even forced us to delay our launch by two weeks as we needed to figure out how to serve updates to our users without the help of WordPress.org. In this blogpost I’d love to take you through the reasoning for this sudden switch.

Tensions in the WordPress ecosystem have been high in the last couple of months. If you’ve managed to remain blissfully ignorant of this, I envy you, but I will have to burst your bubble in order to explain what happened. A large legal battle between Automattic (creators and maintainers of WordPress’ for-profit version WordPress.com) and WPEngine, owned by the private equity firm Silver Lake have sparked a series of controversies, that started off with a decision to ban WP Engine from wordpress.org.

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