2013 in Review

2013 was a great year for Easy Digital Downloads. We released numerous major updates to the plugin, brought on several new team members, and significantly grew the business. With today being the first day of 2014, we’re really looking forward to the great things to come in the next 365 days, but first let’s take a quick look back on some of the elements that made 2013 great.

Two New Core Developers

During 2013, we added two new core developers to the team: Andrew Munro and Daniel Griffiths. Both of these guys are truly excellent developers that have made numerous significant contributions to Easy Digital Downloads. Andrew is the author of 16 published extensions and Daniel is the author of 8 tremendous extensions (as well as an active contributor to several more). Andrew has made 87 commits to the core EDD code base, and Daniel 106 commits.

It is truly my honor to list both Andrew and Daniel as core developers for Easy Digital Downloads.

Two New Support Team Members

Along with our new core developers, we were also thrilled to welcome two new members of our support team: Blake Pounds and Joel Williams. Each of them brings their own strengths to the table and assist every day to bring you, the users, better and better support response times and experiences. We firmly believe that providing top-notch support to our users, even the unpaid users, is vitally important to the overall success of our platform and the business.

Each of the members of core development team works in the support forum as well, bringing our number of support team members to 8. That’s a pretty big increase from just me, as it was during EDD’s early days, which really wasn’t very long ago.

130 New Extensions Released

During the last 365 days we released 130 new extensions for Easy Digital Downloads. I don’t even know what to say to that, other than “wow”. I never would have imagined in April 2012, when EDD first launched, that we would have 130 extensions built and released in one year. Of this 130, the vast majority are from third-party developers that have chosen to put their valuable development time into building plugins on top of Easy Digital Downloads, and for that, I am truly grateful, and humbled.

17 New Themes Released

Also in the last year, we saw 17 themes for Easy Digital Downloads released. These themes varied from Crowd Funding themes, such as Fundify, to e-book store themes. to “standard” e-commerce themes. One of our main goals for 2014 will be to dramatically increase the number of themes available that provide complete EDD integration and support. Themes have always been our weakest point and we would like to change that, making the process of setting up a new EDD site even easier.

31 Version Releases

I firmly believe that it is our responsibility as developers of an e-commerce platform to iterate quickly and release often. One of the number one reasons to push out a new release is to fix bugs, bugs that may be having negative consequences on the sales and success of thousands of businesses. In 2013, we released 31 updates to the core Easy Digital Downloads plugin. Of these 31 updates, 4 were major releases and 27 were minor “point” releases. New features are generally introduced in major releases and bugs and minor improvements added through point releases.

We plan to continue this trend and always push out updates when they are needed. We believe it’s better for users to update their plugins with the latest patches than it is for them to continue using software with known and fixed bugs. Whether users choose to update is up to them, but we, as the developers, will continue to do our best to ensure the updates are available for those that want or need them.

69 Reviews on WordPress.org

Over the course of the last 365 days, 69 users have submitted reviews to the plugin on WordPress.org. Of these 69, 68 of them were full 5-star reviews, and the one that wasn’t was a 4-star review. For the developers of a platform, receiving solid 5-star reviews is humbling, validating, and awesome. It gives us that extra validation that we are doing something right, and we hope and plan to continue that trend for the next year and years to come.

$63,747.01 Paid Out in Commissions

In 2013, we paid out $63,747.01 in commissions to developers for extension and theme sales. This is an increase of 1129.94% with just $5,182.92 being paid out in 2012. As can be clearly seen in this graph, the commissions we are paying out every month is growing significantly. Do we believe it’s a good time to get involved with Easy Digital Downloads? Certainly.

Over 200 Thousand Downloads to Date

On June 7, 2013 we hit the 100 thousand downloads mark, and just a few short months later we made it to 200 thousand. Here’s to hoping for 500 thousand by the end of 2014.