What's going on with DevPress?

For those of you who don’t know about DevPress, have you been living under a rock? Seriously, it is a WordPress business I began with Tung Do, Patrick Daly, and Ptah Dunbar. All of these guys are awesome at what they do and are great folks to work with.

The main goal of DevPress was to build an awesome WordPress plugin and theme community where everyone was welcome (and a lot more!). Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned in these past six months or so. Therefore, we had to make some tough decisions. In the end, Tung became the sole owner of DevPress.

Tung described our problem best in his official update on the DevPress blog:

DevPress managed to release high quality products and tease the community of buzz-worthy ideas, but what we needed most was consistency. If success is 80% just simply showing up well then we failed.

DevPress team members were all over the place. We never had everyone on the same page at the same time. We had too many ideas and projects that started but never got finished. This is a problem when you’re trying to kick-start a business venture.

The other issue that we ran into is the too-many-chiefs-not-enough-Indians scenario. Since we were all four the owners of the site (equal ownership), each decision had to be agreed upon. For those of you starting up your own business, take my advice: Elect a single shot-caller, one person to make most of the decisions and manage day-to-day operations. Bigger decisions can be made as a team, but smaller things need to be decided upon in a timely fashion so you can move on to the next thing you need to work on.

Tung will be moving forward with some great ideas he’s had for a long time. I’m happy he’s getting a chance to see them through.

Just so you don’t get any tabloid-like ideas about “what really happened,” just know that we’re all parting as friends. DevPress is changing directions because it was the best move for the business and the WordPress community.

I don’t feel like I’ve lost anything. I feel like I’ve made three great friends who I can rely on. Don’t be surprised if you find two or more of us working together in the future.

What does this mean for me?

For starters, JustinTadlock.com is once again the home of my WordPress tutorials. You can now find all of the tutorials I wrote for DevPress in the WordPress section of this blog.

Theme Hybrid members are getting a few plugins (DevPress plugins and unreleased plugins) as well as the News theme. I’ll be keeping members updated as I continue moving stuff over to the site.

Outside of that, it’ll be the same ol’, same ol’. I’ll just continue breaking WordPress while trying to do cool things with it.