Welcome to David’s Home for Wayward Plugins. It started when one plugin I rely on for my sites was put up for adoption. Since I used the plugin, I decided to adopt it. Then another plugin — this one a donation plugin that tens of thousands of nonprofits rely on for their operating funds — was abandoned as well. Over the course of a month, I wound up adopting a total of ten plugins that now have more than 40,000 active users and nearly 250,000 downloads.
In this session, I’ll describe the joys and challenges of adopting plugins, the discoveries I’ve made, and tips you can use if you either want to adopt a plugin or wonder what it takes to keep a plugin alive once the original developer needs to move on. I’ll also walk through Seamless Donations, a success story. This plugin went from abandoned to thriving, and is now the most popular donations plugin for WordPress, with its own small library of add-ons that help to support its ongoing development and operational costs.