Piklist, a development framework that helped people build things faster with WordPress, is shutting down. Its creators, Steve Bruner and Kevin Miller, launched the framework on June 12, 2012, at WordCampNYC. Over the next nine years it gained a devoted following.

The framework was used by developers to speed up tasks such as creating fields for settings pages, registering custom post types and custom taxonomies, and adding post-to-post relationships. 

This week Piklist’s creators announced  that the plugin will no longer be updated at WordPress.org, and the website, support forum, and documentation have been archived on Github pages. With competing obligations, they were never able to properly monetize the framework:

We released 92 versions, making it more stable and secure, but we never had time to take it to the next level.

We’re partners in Piklist, but we have our own separate WordPress development shops and use Piklist with our clients. Every day, we worked on improving it, but sadly life just got in the way. We both have families, and our client work took precedence over making a business out of Piklist.

After WordPress 5.0 introduced Gutenberg, the goal for the next major version of Piklist (2.0) was to allow it to be used with or without Gutenberg or the Classic Editor so that users could move forward without any issues. The team had been working on it since 2018 but were not able to resolve all the issues.

“The block editor definitely increased the delays in getting out another major version, but we also saw a lot of opportunity there,” Bruner told the Tavern.

“Letting go of the project was tough. Piklist has a dedicated user base that stuck with us all these years. But we just couldn’t get to a 2.0, which wasn’t fair to our users, so we decided to shut it down instead of dragging it out.” Bruner emphasized how much his team loved their users and how proud they were of the support they provided over the past nine years.

“Not only did we educate users on how to use Piklist, we educated them on how WordPress worked,” he said. “Though the plugin is no longer available, users’ data is still safely stored in their database. Piklist did things the WordPress way and data was stored normally. Any plugin or library that can pull standard metadata, can be used to access the data Piklist saved.”