Regarding GSoC 2013

I keep hearing about that and that has been a while. In defense…of anyone creating an import plugin for the masses. That includes myself who plans to re-develop existing imports plus release more. I say this…

All of these importers are tricky business. Even this one us some serious one star ratings as do my own despite having clients like Ryanair Ltd who use my plugins daily.

Problem is there are endless variables in data related projects. There are even more variables in the user; how users might want them to work, expect them to work and need them to work. Some don’t know how they need them to work to get the outcome they desire or even know the outcome possible using their data and so on.

There are even more complications in premium importers that are more advanced. CSV 2 POST is my own and I have endless chicken and egg scenarios. Due to spinning content, generating values or mass manipulating them on the fly, during post creation. Troubleshooting issues is tough because there are endless settings, some may not apply to the users data or the plugin may actually have a bug.

It all just takes a lot of work and time. Too much I reckon, for a free plugin anyway.

I am well aware that importers are “tricky business”, but to many they are an essential part in repairing and rebuilding WordPress websites, and as such should be considered a part of the normal release cycle rather than a plugin feature.

That is, however, beside the point. The gsoc svn trunk 1.0.0beta does, in fact, work with vanilla 3.8 (at least a few quick tests worked flawlessly), and I’m looking for some reasoning behind it not being released when time and resources was delegated to the GSoC project last year. That is, I was hoping someone involved with that process could give an update to the status of the plugin.