Matthias,

That contributions graph only represents activity in the “master” branch, so all activity in the 3.0 and other feature is excluded from that graph.

The moment our “release/3.0” branch is merged into master you will see that graph significantly change 🙂

The “pulse” page is a much better indicator of activity because it will tell you the total commits to all branches and also shows pull request, merges, and issue activity: https://github.com/easydigitaldownloads/easy-digital-downloads/pulse/

@Pippin
Perhaps it’s time for you and JJJ to get more involved into the development again. When I look at this graph EDD development is standing still
https://github.com/easydigitaldownloads/easy-digital-downloads/graphs/contributors

Sure, there is a lot of work behind the scenes, but a least the should be a result.
Don’t understand me wrong. EDD is working still fine, but I already had a project in the last years with a software still in beta over years. Don’t want to loose EDD, too 😉
Thanks
Matthias

Neil,

We would love to have five or 10 more developers working on EDD, but we are a small team and we do the best we can with what we have. Our EDD development team today is made up of five main developers and several more that assist as needed.

The Github activity you mentioned is only a small piece of the picture. Keep in mind that only finished finished code is committed into the release/3.0 branch. There is also a lot of activity that happens in other branches while a bug or feature is being built. It only gets merged into release/3.0 when we consider it “release ready”. 3.0 also significantly impacts a huge number of extensions, so along with with the development activity in the core plugin’s repository there is also a lot of development activity in the repositories of the individual extensions so that those extensions work properly when 3.0 is released. Most of the extension repos are private and so not visible to people that we haven’t explicitly granted access to.

There is another update being drafted on this blog for later this week that will be sharing a few more status updates.

Thank you for responding so frankly – it highlights to me yet again your honesty & integrity. I’ve never had any problems with you or your commitment – just the lack of progress & communication on EDD 3.0.

But you don’t address the elephant in the room IMO – i.e. you just don’t have enough people working on getting EDD to Beta.

I looked in detail at the EDD GitHub repo before writing my comment. It was what I saw there that made me finally admit that I had to start looking for a viable alternative to EDD.

What I noticed on branch release 3.0 was:

* around 47 commits so far in June, 170 in May & 203 in April
* around 16 issues closed so far in June, 66 in May & roughly 20 in April
* commits from 3 developers with 1 senior developer partly involved

That seems far too light to me – especially for a project of this magnitude & complexity.

I know the numbers above can’t tell the whole story, especially to an outsider not directly involved in the project day to day, but it sure looked like the GitHub repo of a project going very slowly, with a lack of staff & unlikely to make it to Beta anytime soon.

Neil,

Your criticism is absolutely fair. We have not done a good job communicating the status and progress of EDD 3.0 and it weighs on us every day.

When we set out to build 3.0 several years ago, our goal was to build it in 3-6 months. We pulled all of our development resources away from other projects and put everyone onto 3.0. We made monumental progress during those first months but we soon discovered that our goals were far too ambitious. The project was simply so massive.

One of the major goals of 3.0 is to completely rethink the database model and fix a very long list of problems that were a result of the original database model. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like that large of a task, but it is easily the single most difficult things we’ve ever worked on. The challenge is not just working through how to migrate existing data into the new models, but also how to do it without breaking tens of thousands of stores. There are hundreds of EDD extensions that modify the default behavior, and the majority of these are built by 3rd party developers. We have to be extremely careful and thorough so that we do not unintentionally wreck havoc on those extensions and the stores they are used on.

Database migrations of this scale are nightmares for developers and dev ops because there are just so many things that can go wrong. If just one part of the migration doesn’t go perfectly, it could cause significant issues for the store. Our job, along with delivering the final product that we’ve been promising for years, is to ensure we do our absolute best to ensure the data migrations work perfectly.

We thought doing this would only take 3-6 months to complete. We were wrong. We then thought it would maybe take another six months. We were wrong. We’ve been wrong over and over again on the timeframes that we expect because we continue to find more and more edge cases that must be accounted for. Today we’re not promising a timeframe because we’ve clearly not managed to meet those in the past, instead we are promising that it will be released when it is ready and not before. We are getting very close to having a public beta but the date for that release won’t become known until our development team finalizes their final list of issues and their extensive testing.

If anyone wishes to see what remains to be addressed in 3.0, our Github milestone has a complete list. You can also see our pre-alpha project here and our post alpha project here.

3.0 will be completed, that I can promise. Will it be within the next six months? I hope so but our commitment is not to a timeline but rather an assurance to our customers that we will only release it when it is actually ready.

Thank you for the feedback, Neil.

– Easy Digital Downloads 3.0 is expected to be released sometime in the first or second quarter of 2018 and with it we are shipping a significant number of changes. To help developers and users alike prepare for the 3.0 release, we’ll be communicating these changes through this blog consistently over the next few months. –

Now June 2020 – that’s now almost 2.5 years. EDD has just not delivered on either completion or regular communication – one of the worst examples I can think of in my many years working with WordPress.

EDD just does not deserve our continued support.

I expect this comment wont be posted & I wont get a reply – but I might be pleasantly supplied.