Back in July I announced some big changes with Organize Series and its extensions due to me being hired by Automattic. This included making all existing extensions free. To support the change, I just made a few quick edits to the backend to remove the paywall and provide links to all extensions on Github. However, this meant keeping all the plugins and theme customizations I had done in v3 of the website which included paid subscriptions for some things which I no longer get paid income from Organize Series to support. So I needed to switch away from all those things to a new theme.
Since I’ve been working quite a bit with Gutenberg lately, I decided for v4 of the website to see how far I could push building the site with Gutenberg blocks, some (free) Blocks plugins and the new Twenty Twenty theme. The result is what you see now!
It actually went a lot easier than I thought it would and this initial iteration took me about 5-6 hours to get up. I did end up doing a child theme of twenty-twenty with some slight customizations and styling, but on the whole pretty much all the layout of key pages (home page, features, and extensions) is done with Gutenberg.
Anyways, going forward this will help keep the costs of maintaining Organize Series much lower (shaving off about $700 a year). I still have to remove my dependency on Help Scout (I’m going to move all the docs back onto this website over time).
5 replies on “V4 Website Launch”
Nice job Darren!
Since I have virtually no income from our Tibesar Archives located at Tibesar.com, I basically had to do the same thing you did in minimizing your costs for hosting your OS plugin and extensions!
Initially, I changed Tibesar.com over to Twenty-Twenty, but then changed again to the Automattic Newspack theme. Since both of these themes are fully Gutenberg ready, the transition was relatively painless (about a days work). My personal blog is also using Twenty-Twenty at https://www.marcustibesar.com
Thank you for continuing to support Organize Series. It is an absolute critical plugin for our family members’ archives, and we have been using it since about 2011/2012ish… We literally have hundreds of Series now, and almost every post in our archives are placed within a Series. Throughout all the recent WordPress and Gutenberg updates it continues to work flawlessly.
Also, thank you for your hard work and your development team’s work on Gutenberg. It has totally changed the WordPress landscape, and it has made WordPress a whole lot more user friendly.
As always Marcus, I really appreciate your kind words and you taking the time to give feedback! I wish more folks using free WordPress plugins would do the same. The appreciation goes a long way.
Thank you for the extensive & continual efforts you’ve put into this plugin! This adds very helpful functionality to the WordPress post system.
In the interest of helping your efforts, I also wanted to let you know that a couple of the links on https://organizeseries.com/extensions/ are reversed. The “Get from Github” for “Shortcodes” points to the “Extra Tokens” Github destination; the “Extra Tokens” button points to “Shortcodes.” Hope this helps & THANK YOU again for all you do!
Thanks for catching this and reporting it! I’ve fixed the links.
Sure thing!
Also: I noticed after my original comment that the descriptions on those two items are reversed as well. Hope this helps – I really appreciate all the efforts you have to undertake for this plugin!