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Jetpack (by WordPress.com) made available on Edublogs.org network???

Hi,

First, sorry for my limited English.

I have just read that the Jetpack plugin (made by WordPress.com) has been made available on Edublogs.org (owned by WPMUDEV/incsub). This was quite a surprise to me, as this plugin includes several marketing elements related to a direct competitor of your own business (see http://wordpress.com/classrooms or http://vip.wordpress.com/spotlight/education). It also requires that your users (I mean users of Edublogs) create a WordPress.com account.

(1) Please, would you like to share the reasons why you finally decided to add this product despite the associated annoyances? (2) Are you using a custom version of the plugin that maybe removes some annoying parts? (3) Did you consider using the fork of Jetpack, known as Slim Jetpack?

I’m asking these 3 questions because I’m sure many WPMUDEV users (especially network owners, but not only) face the same dilemma: using Jetpack and take the risk of losing customers or finding… alternatives? But what alternatives?

Slim Jetpack sounds cool, but this plugin is only maintained by a single person. Is it reliable? Will it be maintained in the future?

And that’s where comes my last question: (4) Would you (WPMUDEV/incsub) have any interest in helping to develop/maintain the existing fork or maybe creating a custom solution for your own business (Edublogs) and your WPMUDEV customers (us)?. Of course, that would be awesome. :slight_smile:

Thank you for sharing your knowledge and experience!

Any more thoughts welcomed.

Wed, 29 Jan 2014 20:17:52
  • Vaughan
    • Ex Staff

    Hi @Lorange,

    I would love to be able to answer your questions, but edublogs features aren’t something we deal with much on the Dev site, I can’t actually provide any info on the reasoning for this personally, however I will certainly flag a member of staff who can answer your questions.

    I’ll let them know & hopefully 1 of them will respond shortly.

    Thanks

  • Ronnie Burt
    • Recruit

    Hi Lorange,

    Good questions!

    Basically, there were two features in Jetpack that our users always asked about that, that while we could develop ourselves, would just be easier to give them access to Jetpack. That is post by email and publicize – both of which are pretty good user experiences. We don’t like that Edublogs users have to create WP.com accounts and connect up – but it’s a trade off.

    We already provide stats, email subscription, and loads more that Jetpack provides, so we did want to hide those features (*cough* using plugins that are here on WPMU DEV *cough*)

    So, we did as you said and made our own version hiding the modules that we wanted to hide.

    I’m not sure it’d be a good idea for us to make it a WPMU DEV project, since we really didn’t develop any of it – but we’ll look into if we could make it available on github or similar. We also wouldn’t want an official release on the WordPress repository because, well, we may not keep up with it as much as the greater community would prefer, when really we just wanted a few features for Edublogs :slight_smile:

    If we decide to make what we’ve done available, we’ll update the thread here, but we probably won’t make a bunch of noise about it.

    Hope this helps!

  • Lorange
    • The Incredible Code Injector

    Thank you for the detailed answer, Ronnie.

    What is frustrating with Jetpack, is that it forces users to connect with the commercial platform WordPress.com, even for “modules” that have no need for their API and that were working just fine before as independent plugins.

    I would love to see more developers engage in this Jetpack fork, which is available on Github, as mentioned on the plugin page: http://wordpress.org/plugins/slimjetpack/

    Maybe there are some interested poeple here? Unfortunately I’m not a developer myself…

  • Lorange
    • The Incredible Code Injector

    Yes, I understand that.

    Side note:

    Basically, there were two features in Jetpack that our users always asked about […] That is post by email and publicize

    Regarding the first feature, it is worth noting the existence of the “Post by email” plugin, which is part of the Make WordPress Core and will probably be officially maintained by WordPress in the future. As far as I know, it supports all the major features of the “Post by Email” module built in Jetpack.

    More on this: Why Post By Email Is Still Available In WordPress? (WP Tavern)