This post comes with a heavy heart. I created the Piwik plugin for Magento over 4 years ago. Today I have taken my plugin offline in the Magento store. The issue is simple. I created this plugin at a time I needed it for a very specific project. I decided to share it with the world. People became more demanding and looking for support on a free plugin. It was fine when I was still using Magento. It was also great when I had people who helped support it with code contributions (thank you Sprankhub and florinel-chis). However, it has finally taken it’s toll. I no longer have the reasons I did to use Magento. I only have an install running for this Piwik plugin and support requests have mounted, where none existed before. The plugin still works for me, and always has. Magento is a hard software to work on with many different variables. Nevertheless, more recent shop owners using Magento don’t seem to want to troubleshoot. They’d rather run to me to ask for help. The spirit of what has happened is essentially captured in this Tweet:
May you write a successful open source project – Ancient Babylonian Curse
— Gigasquid (@gigasquid) January 8, 2016
Truth be told, though, Magento is moving forward to Magento 2, and the reality is I have no stomach or interest in updating this plugin. Most importantly, I do not want a plugin out there with my name on it, where I cannot give 100% of my time or interest. I’d rather remove it now, while at the top, then let it die a slow death or being ignored.
Nonetheless,I did not want to leave everyone in the lurch, so I had been talking to Piwik for over 2 years to take this plugin on as an official plugin. They seemed open to it. A couple of months ago, I told them the time has come for me to push this to happen. I have not heard much about this from them, but your voice may make it happen. And trust me, it’s better they create a Magento plugin. You have to understand, most importantly, I am not a developer by training. I built this out of need and through self-teaching. It was started with a passion, which is now gone. I now feel the project would benefit from better support from Piwik directly.
Nonetheless, the plugin is still available on Github here. You are free to fork it, improve it and do as you will. I for one am done supporting it. I am open to code improvements, but I will no longer be offering support or solving issues. It’s time for me to move on to other things.
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