Ladies and Gents, we give you WPMUDEV Premium.
This is a joint project between Andrew Billits and myself that aims to find a way to provide complex custom plugins, materials, hacks and support for WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) for a fraction of the amount you’d have to pay a developer.
It’s already stuffed full of goodies; there’s the multi-database code that’s used on Edublogs (happily supporting 50,000 blogs on the one domain), mu-plugins to give you the lowdown on all your user activity (active users, posts, comments and more!), unbranded support videos for you to use on your WPMU site and a new bumper theme pack with uploadable headers a gogo.
And lots, lots, lots, more… which we’re going to be adding to all the time.
Plus there are comprehensive support forums to back up all of the code there.
Oh, and you can suggest projects that you’d like to see, and if they’re feasible we’ll look into developing them… not bad huh!
Sure, in an ideal world we’d like to be releasing all of this for free, but an *enormous* amount of time has gone into developing it and we’d like to get a system going whereby we can actually support ourselves (and eventually others?) in providing an equal amount of ongoing development and support… while being able to afford to eat.
So, here you have it… let us know what you think and, um, tell all your friends :D
I’m a little unclear about which “ideal world” you’re referring to. That is, even the most strident free software advocates have no problem with you charging for hosting and support. I don’t get the impression that WMPUDEV includes a lot of proprietary code to upset free software idealists.
There is also the “ideal world” where energy, food, silicon chips, etc. are are limitless and free and nobody wants or needs to charge for their labor, but those options aren’t really on the table, and you don’t have to apologize for living in that world.
Thanks Tom, it’s appreciated.
I guess we’re still figuring out how OS and business can sit side by side, and I’m anticipating the odd snipe or two.
The server seems down? I can’t get to it.
“Sure, in an ideal world we’d like to be releasing all of this for free, but an *enormous* amount of time has gone into developing it”
It’s a good thing the developers of MU itself didn’t have that philosophy.
Hi Matt,
I just checked and the site is up. No clue what could have caused the downtime.
According to pingdom it’s been fine, but that’s pingdom :)
To be honest Matt I think we’re aiming at providing paid support as much as plugins, don’t you guys have a paid service for that too?
Awesome james
C congrats congrats l
This is pretty nice James. Glad to see that someone finally saw the Community had a need and was willing to help fill that need at a level that doesn’t require corporate level funding.
Granted, small time users may not be able to participate, but those who have the need for this type of service can finally relax as that need that has been void for so long has been filled.
I’m sorry Matt has to feel the way he does, and make a remark like that, but then again MU’s development benefits their flagship service so I can’t agree that they aren’t getting anything out of it.
Correct me if I’m wrong but aren’t the developers of WPMu holding back a good chunk of software that they developed for wp.com and not releasing it at all? Maybe I’m mistaken but that’s what it looks like to me.