What an exciting time and Christmas present, both for me and for everyone who wanted to try SNIP before spending money. SNIP free is now available on w.orgs plugin directory.

On my last post (What’s next in SNIP) I wrote about the free version of the plugin that I wanted to launch till the end of the year. In super excited that I can say: it’s done!

SNIP – My Structured Data Plugin for WordPress is no available on WordPress.org, too!

It got me some headaches!

It’s very exciting every time you launch a new product. You really never know what’s going to happen. With this launch, something happened that I never expected: Some of my customers who use the Pro version of the plugin were suddenly offered the free version for download with the update to version 2.20.0. Some of them had done the update and were then confronted with a reduced feature set.

What happened?

It took me some time to understand what was happening. Through the free version, which is online since today, WordPress has matched its own plugin list with the one in the repository. Of course it found an entry and therefore offered an update.
I thought that this could not happen at all, because each plugin gets its own slug identifier, which is unique for each plugin. For me this is “snip-structured-data”. The pro version has no slug. Nevertheless, the wrong version was loaded. How can this be? The slug identifier is not used at all during the update check. It seems that only the title is checked. And it was the same for both plugin versions. So the solution was quite simple: Change the title!

Anyway. I had to change the version number from 2.20.0 to 2.0.0 for the version on w.org to avoid that all customers suddenly get the free version. I’ll change it back during the next days.

What an exciting day! 😉