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Epic Plugins: Year in Review 2015
As I have done for the past two years I wanted to write my year in review for epic plugins. It’s been quite a year this year. I thought I’d write this post into a number of sections this time, but first a high level overview
Overview of the year
2015 started the year with a big change for digital producers, the introduction of VATmoss and the need to charge customers VAT based on the countries they are from. This meant 2015 kicked off with a complete tear down of our online store and the building of a new store (using WooCommerce and Taxamo) and in line with that, a new theme for the store pages.. phew.
OK, minor blip out of the way..
The rest of the year has been taken up with a LOT of development time spent on the plugin hunt theme with a whopping 71 new features added to the theme over the year. It’s crazy how much this theme has developed over the year compared to our very first version back on the 6th December 2014.
It’s been a year of fewer plugin releases compared to 2012 (8 plugins) 2013 (15 plugins and 1 theme) and 2014 (2 plugins and 3 themes) with 2015 coming in at (3 plugins and 1 theme).
In 2015 we released three new plugins (social gallery analytics, collections plugin and opinion8) but we also released a new theme (issue tracker) and experimented with other markets (iOS and a couple of SaaS ideas).
There’s been a bit of culling of plugins during 2015 to remove the plugins which were not selling well and difficult to maintain and or support. You can see the full list of plugins and themes at 31 December 2015 here.
Sections of this review in detail
- Timeline of events for the years
- A peak into our support statistics
- A look at our team structure
SECTION 1 – Timeline of events for the year
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Jan 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 1.0 through to Version 1.8 released
- 24 new features
- 20+ bug fixes and improvements
-
Feb 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 1.9 through to Version 2.2 released
- 10 new features
- 5+ bug fixes and improvements
-
Mar 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 2.3 through to Version 2.7 released
- 10 new features
- 10+ bug fixes and improvements
-
Apr 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 2.8 through to Version 3.1 released
- WordPress 4.0 compatibility updates
- 4+ bug fixes and improvements
-
May 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 3.2 through to Version 3.4 released
- 6 new features
- 7+ bug fixes and improvements
-
Jun 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 3.5 released
- 1 new feature
- 0 bug fixes and improvements
-
Jul 2015
Pulse WP developed
- Baremetrics for PayPal Products developed to track own sales
- PayPal API only available for business users
- Kept as private product for personal use
- Bugs in software need to be squished (with PayPal API issues)
Social Gallery Analytics Released
- Find out your Social Gallery images Analytics using this plugin analytics add on
-
Aug 2015
Go Squiggle iPad App Produced
- A fun app to test the waters on the App Store
- Initial traction but steep drop off
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Sep 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 3.6 through to Version 3.6.2 released
- 20+ new features
- 5++ bug fixes and improvements
- Complete redesign of a large number of template files
Epic Hackers Theme updated with new voting functionality
- Version 1.1 released
- 10+ new features
- 10+ bug fixes and improvements
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Oct 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 3.6.3 to 3.6.4 released
- 0 new features
- small bug fixes and improvements
Collections Stand Alone Plugin Released
- Like on Plugin Hunt but on your own theme images uing this plugin analytics add on
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Nov 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 3.7 through to Version 3.8 released
- 4 new features
- 5+ bug fixes and improvements
Opinion 8 WordPress Plugin Released
- Easily gague your website visitors opinions with this plugin
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Dec 2015
Plugin Hunt Theme feature requests and updates
- Version 3.9 released
- 1 new feature (API integrations)
- New licensing options introduced
- 0 bug fixes and improvements
Issues Tracker WordPress Theme Released
- Easily track your projects with this theme
SECTION 2 A peek into our support stats
You can check out the full details of the support forum statistics here for 2015 compared to 2014. The highlights are:-
- I handled around 50% less of the support
- A support assistant (James / Karim) handled the majority of requests
- Support team replies were up to 1400+ replies to tickets in the year – an increase of 24%
- Support tickets (new queries from customers) increased to 572 new ticks – an increase of 42%
SECTION 3 Our team structure
2015 has seen the departure of Karim from our support team (he couldn’t take on any work outside of his studies due to his study visa plans) and the introduction of James into our support team during the year. There haven’t been any further expansions of the team with the majority of development and developer level technical support being handled by myself. We outsourced the development of the Opinion8 plugin and depending on how this project goes one of the 2016 goals is to look for additional development resources to help bolster our team
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