WordPress.org Directory Announcement

Effective Dec 1st, 2021 through June 1st, 2022 the following products listed on WordPress.org will go into “maintenance mode.” At that point, they will be retired and sunset from WordPress.org. During this time only critical security or support items will be addressed.

• Point of Sale (POS)

• Product Add-ons

• Store Hours Manager

• Cost of Good Manager

• Account Manager

• Leads CRM

While we are retiring the WordPress.org plugins, BizSwoop plugins are not going away, quite the opposite. We will discuss the reasons why later in this post, but for now let’s address the changes that will take place if you’re currently using the open source WordPress.org versions of our products.

I use the WordPress.org versions of your plugins, what’s going to happen?
You can continue to use the plugins as they are, but they will no longer receive new updates or support.

What critical security or support will you address in the Maintenance Mode phase?
Any bugs identified as data security or privacy related. Any fatal errors with core WooCommerce plugin code base. All other bugs or issues will no longer be supported.

I still need your plugin, new features and support, what should I do?
We are fully committed to creating amazing products to fulfill your full range of business needs. All of our plugins will continue to be updated and supported directly from our site. As a thank you for using our open source plugins, we will be providing a substantial discount towards the upgrade to any of our paid plans. To receive the discount, create a support request to our sales team. 

What is the future of BizSwoop plugins?
The future is bright, full of new features, new versions and a robust roadmap of development. 

• Our popular Point of Sale plugin will start supporting more business types with a Cloud version. The Cloud version will offer security, taking resources off of your server, providing automatic updates, along with a host of other features coming in 2022, but don’t worry a self-hosted version of the plugin will still be available. 

• The Product Add-ons plugin is becoming part of our new Product Manager product with a whole suite of added 55+ additional included features! We added Product Tables, Product Bundles, Samples, Frequency, Order restrictions and much more. 

• The Store Hours Manager plugin is becoming part of our Store Order Hours product, as the easiest solution to open and close your WooCommerce store. You will be able to continue to set your store hours on a schedule. Now we are providing more advanced features to display alerts and hours in a box or bar, custom quick navigation links, shortcodes, floating widget, custom branding and more.

• The Cost of Good Manager, Account Manager and Leads CRM plugins will be joining our B2B Wholesale Plus product, adding to an already advanced plugin for businesses. The plugin will offer and manage a powerful shopping experience for Business to Business (B2B), Wholesale and Enterprise Customers. 

• The Print Manager plugin, and BizPrint cloud services, we’ll still offer the ability to download the plugin connector to the BizPrint cloud services on WordPress.org. Coming in 2022 we’ll share more exciting news for our Print service. Stay tuned for those updates. 

Change is difficult, we understand this can even be disruptive in the short term as we plan for the future. We are committed to making our products better each day, adding new features, learning from our users and providing exceptional customer service. 

Why are you making this change?
After 4 years of contributing to the community, listening to countless business owners, agencies, developers and hobbyists alike, we’ve come to a difficult decision to sunset our plugins off of WordPress.org. Our ability to contribute to the open source code base, while also providing a freemium and premium add-ons business model has proven to not be sustainable, which you might have felt as a user of the freemium open source plugins. We love free plugins, like anyone else and we love the open source community, but this is no longer the best forum for us to serve both those goals and you properly. 

Focus more on our mission

By making this change, it will allow us to move closer to meeting our mission statement as a business: to provide greater technology access to small and medium businesses (SMB’s). The type of features we have developed have been described as “core business functionality” which by nature, require heavy support and development resources to keep your business running. Our teams want to commit all our resources to the high-touch support and premium quality of our plugins. To achieve greater technology access for all business types, we will continue to strive in providing free options for some products and affordable pricing directly on BizSwoop.com to our small and medium businesses users.  

What happens to open source contributions

Even though we won’t be contributing any longer on the WordPress directory repositories, we are still a firm believer in the open source role in software development and will continue to contribute to the community in our public repositories. We encourage you to follow our projects, collaborate and get involved as we build our plugins for the future.

Continue to build great plugins

As we make this transition off of WordPress.org, you will see the benefits of this change as we invest our development and support resources into our growing suite of professional plugins This prioritization will provide a more stable and reliable plugin for you, better support experiences when support is needed, more new features for your store and most importantly, a better experience for your end users and customers.

Thank you for your support over the years, we are excited to continue our journey with you by providing amazing solutions for the business community of global e-commerce businesses that rely on us.