Hi Chistopher, Rudi + all
I feel like I need to provide a bit of an explanation on what’s going on with v3.
As you realise, v3 estimations have just kept extending and extending.
I understand the wait and frustration with this – we completely share some of those frustrations (it’s been a long road), but we couldn’t be more enthusiastic about what we’re going to release!
The main issue from our side is the scope has kept growing. After year 1, we had a rough prototype ready, that did a bunch of cool things with a new architcture – but then along came Gutenberg (well, more like we decided to wake up to the fact it had arrived).
While we’re not pivoting to be a Gutenberg only plugin (though we will have a full native integration with the block editor), the arrival and advancement of Gutenebrg has also brought everyones standards and expectations forward – and our users (rightly so) demand more these days – more WYSIWYG editing capabilites and a better admin UI.
So we pivoted again, rebuilt pretty much ground up (again), and have settled on an infrastructure we’re really happy with – one that’s going to support us for years to come.
If I’m being completely transparent, in this time we have also had to stop and learn React (the programming library wp-admin will be using from now and into the future). To learn something is one thing, but to learn it well enough to release in a plugin used by tens of thousands of users requires a significant amount of time – we’ve taken extra time to work through all this properly.
All in all there have been a fair few significant delays, but ones which we feel have been necessary – and now we have a working product which we’re now playing with (testing) and finishing off (this is v3 free)…
Then the pro version will be some months behind – a good bunch of functionality for that has already been written.
In about a month, I’ll be doing another write up, explaining in detail our final roadmap, and sharing the v3 free plugin for everyone test and play with.
I don’t want to commit to anything more solid that that right now, but we are closer than we have ever been.
Thanks for the continued support and interest in Search & Filter, me and the team are grateful!
Back to work we go 🔨
PS, some links that may be of interest:
– We have a v3 mailing list (just setup) which we’ll use to send out info on progress
– We will be also be using twitter to keep everyone updated
– I’m adding some development previews to my personal youtube account
