It’s been well over a year since I last blogged about WP-Cumulus. In the mean time, there have been all sorts of developments. I’ve been in serious talks with a potential buyer. That didn’t work out. I’ve tried, a number of times, to do a rewrite. That didn’t work out either. But most importantly, I gradually lost interest. Which is why I’ve decided I’ll no longer dedicate any time to Cumulus.
Flash
There are a number of reasons why I feel it no longer makes sense to work on WP-Cumulus. One of the most important things is that Flash is now essentially a dying technology. It’s not on iOS, no longer developed for Android, and dead in the water on many other platforms. Also, tag clouds in general seem be less popular now. Other reasons are more personal, but they all boil down to time. Supporting and developing a popular plugin takes lots of time. Time I’m no longer able to spend on this project.
Great run
It’s been a great run though. 770,000 downloads from wordpress.org, big companies like MEXX, Coop and Sennheiser using Cumulus on their websites, numerous ports to other platforms. Cumulus was my first real open source project, and it’s been an eye-opener. It’s made me fall in love with the concept of free software, and has been an excellent learning experience. But most of the web has since moved on, and so should I.
Up for grabs
As of right now, I no longer recommend you use WP-Cumulus. It still works on the latest version of WordPress, but it’s likely to fail in the near future. It uses old, deprecated APIs and hasn’t been thoroughly tested in a long time. Should anyone be interested in picking up where I left off, please feel free to contact me. I’ll help any way I can. There’s code I can share and thoughts I can offer.