Over the weekend, I posted version 1.0 of my RSVPMaker WordPress plugin … swiftly followed by version 1.1 with some bug fixes. Still, it’s a milestone, even if only an arbitrary one. I called the initial release in November 0.6, recognizing that even though I’d been playing with variations on this code for years, it would need to go through a shakedown to be generally useful to a variety of people and organizations. Now, I think it’s getting there, even though plenty of room for improvement remains.
I wrote about the learning process I’ve gone through with this project a couple of weeks ago (My Open Source Adventure with RSVPMaker). The couple of glitches that popped up with the 1.0 release weren’t show stoppers, just unexpected side effects of the latest changes. For example, I added an uninstall.php file without understanding that WordPress automatically looks for a file by that name and runs it when a user wants to delete a plugin. So I had to alter its behavior to remove database entries automatically, without prompting the user to make choices. I provided a separate cleanup.php file for users who want to clean the database more selectively.
One of the tradeoffs of open source development without a budget is everyone becomes a beta tester. Still, it was nothing that couldn’t be quickly fixed, once I became aware it was a problem.
Overall, I’m happy with the way RSVPMaker handles simple events and lets you add special parameters like RSVP start and end dates as necessary.