Kickin’ It Up A Notch

Our plugins have millions of downloads and hundreds of thousands of active users all over the world. We’re proud to have such a large and global audience, but communicating the status of updates to and fixes for our plugins can be challenging at times given the size of it.

We’ve taken great advantage of the usual communication channels—we publish frequently on our blog, in email newsletters, and on social media. But with today’s jam-packed inboxes and cluttered newsfeeds, we know our posts don’t always get in front of everyone that would like to see them. To help solve this problem, we’ve kicked our communications efforts up a notch by creating two new pages to help you get the info you need: The Release Schedule and Known Issues.

The Release Schedule

Our plugin releases fall into three main categories:

  • Feature Releases (Quarterly) — Significant new features for the plugin.
  • Maintenance Releases (Bi-weekly) — Fixes and tweaks to address issues reported to us in the forums.
  • Hotfix Releases (As needed) — A fix to address a security issue or a bug causing major breakages.

The new Release Schedule page goes into more detail on our release process, including a nice breakdown of our version numbers and how they are updated with each release type.

Known Issues

Our QA game is strong, but sometimes issues develop after a release that we did not anticipate. In the past, we’ve posted a sticky thread to the top of the relevant forum to alert users if there was a known issue we were working on. While that method helped many folks, it was a bit clunky to maintain on our end—especially if there was an issue affecting multiple plugins.

Now you can find up-to-date information on significant, high-priority issues we are investigating and working to resolve on our new Known Issues page. This page is limited in scope to those issues that affect a large number of users, but should prove very handy in helping us work with our community to identify and prioritize fixes for our maintenance releases.

The Usual Suspects

These new pages aren’t replacing anything. We’ll still be active on Twitter and Facebook, for example; we will continue to monitor our support forums for bug reports, review feature requests on User Voice, and publish release notes and feature previews on our blog.

With the addition of the Release Schedule and Known Issues pages, we can communicate more effectively across all of these existing channels while also providing two new resources that you can check out yourself any time you’d like.