Is this plugin up to date?

Yep the plugin works fine with the latest versions of both WordPress and PHP, I’ve just not had a need to update the plugin recently. I’ll do so soon.

A small piece of advice: You should not think of seven months as being “a very long time” between updates for free and open source software maintained and supported in the spare time of its developers. WordPress is a mature platform and so are many of its plugins, so they don’t always need to be updated frequently. Thanks to WordPress’ famous commitment to backwards compatibility they’ll usually continue to work fine for many years without maintenance.

thanks for your reply and confirmation.

I’m not a plugin developer.

The view I have expressed is based on what I have heard and seen online in terms of people’s comments and even comments from WP support.

Can’t point to anything specific, but the general feedback is that if a plugin hasn’t been updated for 6 months and is marked as “Untested with your version of WP” in the plugin upload – it probably shouldn’t be installed.

Hence my enquiry.

I guess there is a difference of opinion amongst the plugins fraternity ??

I have installed your plugin and trust that it will be working just fine.
thanks.

There’s no hard and fast rule of course, but I think a better metric is to look at the support forums for the plugin and see either if the maintainers are active in the forums or if there are problems being reported. If you can see threads where the plugin developers are responding then it’s safe to say that you can use the plugin even if it hasn’t been updated recently.

A fixed time frame doesn’t take into account the fact that many plugins are mature and don’t really need frequent maintenance. Note also that WordPress core itself is only released once every 4 months, so if a plugin doesn’t need updating for just one version of WordPress then it can safely go for 8 months without an update.

Anyway, I’ll release an update to WP Crontrol soon as I’ve made a few enhancements recently.

Sure.

However, please kindly note that –

– I don’t know how “mature” a plugin is. I have seen plugins launched years ago which are still immature in terms of their development and maintenance. So I guess it depends on your definition of “maturity”.

– regular updates of fixes, improvement etc is one thing and I agree that some plugins may not require such frequent updates. However when the plugin is not verified as compatible with the current WP version and is listed by WP as “untested”- that’s a red flag for me, especially when the plugin has not been updated for 7 months. As a regular user, I don’t know how many months after the release of the new version WP automatically accommodates all plugins. That’s an insider’s information so thanks for letting me know!

I know that many developers quickly release an update just to confirm that the plugin is compatible with the new version of WP for the users’ peace of mind.

Thanks again for your prompt reply and I’m looking forward to your update!