EDD Add to Cart Popup was one of the plugins we worked on at RebelCode. This is the small team behind WP Mayor, WP RSS Aggregator, and a few add-on plugins for Easy Digital Downloads.
As of Wednesday of last week, our team owned and developed a total of three add-ons for the Easy Digital Downloads e-commerce solution for WordPress, run by Pippin Williamson. As third-party developers, we would be the ones working on the development of the add-ons, while the EDD team would be the ones handling sales and support.
As of Friday, some things had changed. On Thursday, 14th September, Jean and myself were approached by Pippin himself about a sudden change that was happening within EDD. They would no longer be selling third-party add-ons on their website. This meant that all three of the add-ons we had in development were going to be affected in one way or another.
We were told that there were three decisions we can choose from, but they had to be taken as soon as possible. These were either discontinuing the plugin completely (mainly for non-sellers), selling all the rights to the plugin to EDD (an acquisition), or moving the plugin to our own site (e-commerce, support, and all).
The same was being done with all other third-party developers, some of which had already sold their plugins to EDD by the time we were informed of the change. Here’s what had happened just a few hours later.
Add to Cart Popup
This add-on would add the popup functionality when a user adds an item to their cart. It could be customised in layout, style, colour; everything. EDD decided that this would be a good option to add to their core plugin, so they made an offer to acquire it. After very little back and forth, and given that this plugin was not a part of our plans for the coming months, we opted to accept their offer. This was our first official acquisition.
This plugin is now 100% owned by EDD, and we have handed over all development to them. It was a fun plugin to develop, and we did learn a lot from it, but it was time to move on. What we learnt will now be put into our bigger projects.
Checkout Message
This was the add-on that performed the least out of all three. While its functionality would be nice to have within EDD, it was not seen as essential for Pippin and the team. For this reason, and given that it was not worth our time to set up the e-commerce side of things for it, we opted to make it available for free.
EDD Checkout Message is no longer being sold by EDD. It is now available for free in the WordPress plugin repo.
Existing customers will still receive support from EDD, however, their subscriptions are now cancelled, and they will be able to continue using the free version when updates are made to it. We saw this as a good opportunity to also give something back to the community who has supported us for many years.
If you’d like to give it a go, you can download EDD Checkout Message here.
Bookings
EDD Bookings is our biggest project of 2017, so we had no plans to discontinue or sell it for any reason. EDD also saw this as too big a project to undertake themselves, and not part of their core plans. For these reasons, EDD Bookings will now be moving to our own site, to be sold by us, in the coming weeks.
Existing customers will not be affected in that their subscriptions will still be valid, and we will still offer them support for it. As for version 3.0, which is the rewrite we are currently working on, we are now discussing the best way forward.
The way the plugin is sold will change from being a single plugin including the EDD integration. We’re yet to decide on the exact structure, and once we do, we’ll be publishing an announcement about it. A name change could also be in the works over the coming weeks.
If you are an existing customer, do not fret, you will be contacted over the coming weeks as to how the changeover will work, and you will still be entitled to your current license duration. A form of migration from your current version of EDD Bookings to the new plugin will be provided in due course.
We have dedicated many hours to this plugin over the past 10 months or so, and we don’t plan to stop anytime soon. We’ve been working hard as a team (and a small one at that), and with freelancers, to develop something worth investing in for the future of your business’ bookable services. You can learn more about that in my previous article on Building a Painkiller for the Appointment Bookings Space in WordPress.
What’s next?
The next few months are very exciting for us.
We have narrowed our focus down to two plugins; WP RSS Aggregator and EDD Bookings.
EDD Bookings is undergoing a complete rewrite, as I already mentioned. We are just a few weeks away from having a Beta release ready to be shared with the public. Once all the testing has been completed, we’ll be releasing the new version into the wild.
After that, there is a lot of functionality already planned to go into this plugin, and the team is very excited to keep building it up. We’ll be able to share more details about the plugin and its future in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.
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