It’s been a crazy few months to say the least.

Back in October, I started a full time PHP job that was supposed to give me more time with family and to code. It did, but there was a huge piece missing out of my day, WordPress. Since 2007, I’ve almost exclusively been working with WordPress, developing plugins and pushing it’s boundaries.

In October, my new job didn’t involve WordPress, and at first I thought it would just strengthen my PHP skills. Unfortunately it didn’t really do much of either and I decided to move on.

As of last week, I am now part of the RD2 team. My job is multi-faceted, but I was mainly brought on to be their WordPress “guru”, and I can already tell that it’s a great fit.

The above is just the backdrop to this post though, I really want to get right to it. My new years resolution was to be more involved with WordPress day-to-day, spend more time with my family, and foster the next phase of Pods’ life: Pods 2.0.

Many things have led to delays and I won’t stand here and list all of those excuses. The bottom line is that 2.0 is not yet finished. The website isn’t even finished. The ‘free contribution well’ has sort of dried out, I have been paying developers for their help with the project and it’s strained my personal finances. I’m considering some more options for funding but I know so many people have already contributed.

Everything was in place for success, but time worked against me and others involved and I lost my work window I had set. If you can remember back to September, I set aside a few weeks of my work schedule to solely work on Pods 2.0. Then some who were involved to help were unable to contribute as much as they had planned, if at all. I went looking for help, but that became a huge time sink. I should have just gone at it on my own and dealt with the delays. I was impatient and didn’t want to fail, I looked for dev help that just wasn’t there at the time.

Pods 2.0 isn’t stopping

No, no. Far from it. While I’ve had spare time over the past few months, I’ve been planning bigger and better things for Pods, namely, funding. I’ll unveil the new funding idea soon, once I get the remaining details lined up. First, to answer what I can, yes Pods will remain free. I’m however looking at existing models and other funding options to keep development flowing more than just donations. There simply isn’t enough donation power coming in to sustain it. If you want to prove me wrong, please, by all means — you can impact the development of Pods greatly through your donation. If you have time and are experienced with Pods, you can jump in now to contribute.

I will continue to work on getting the new site launched and finishing up Pods 2.0 Alpha, there’s so much I can’t wait to commit for you to test! I’m trying to limit the commits so everything doesn’t break at once 😉

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to Pods 2.0 so far, either monetarily, or through development. Your contributions do not go unnoticed!