Putting WordPress plugins up for adoption & transferring ownership

After writing last year about various ways of walking away from WordPress plugins that you’ve developed, I put words into action and put 3 of my plugins up for adoption. Two months later and 2 out of the 3 have now been taken over by other developers.

In this post I want to share what I did to achieve this and what actions were then taken afterwards to hand them over to their new owners.

One of the first decisions I had to made was… what would I do if I couldn’t fine someone to adopt it? Well, I decided to give it a year and then I’d have the plugin closed down. But I wanted to make sure users were aware, and pushed to finding an alternative if this happened. So, my solutions here represent advertising the adoption but also educating the users as to the consequences of not taking action.

In the following cases, I’ll use one of my plugins (Open Currency Converter) as the example.

Setting the plugins up for adoption

Marking for adoption

One of the first things I did was add a tag of adopt-me to the README meta. This adds the following to the directory listing…

It also means it shows in searches for this tag too.

Support and README Messages

I added the following messages, first to the wordpress.org support forum for the plugin (which was pinned) and then the second is added to top of the README (both the plugin readme.txt and also Github’s README.md) …

Important: Please read before posting

I’ve taken the difficult decision to no longer develop this plugin. It will receive critical updates (such as security problems) but nothing more. This plugin has been tested up to WordPress 6.4 and PHP 7.4, and this won’t change as a result.

During December 2024, I will have the plugin removed from the directory. In the meantime, I would strongly recommend looking for an alternative plugin to switch over to.

If you’re a developer, and would like to adopt this plugin, please get in touch with me.

**Note:**
**This plugin will no longer be updated, other than for critical security issues. During December 2024, it will be formally closed.**
**[Find out more here](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/important-please-read-before-posting-5/), including, if you’re a developer, how you can adopt it.**

Code Changes

Lastly, I added some code changes.

This was added to the top of each of each screen that the plugin created in admin. It would appear until 2 months before the plugin was due to be closed. It was a reminder about the date but still asking about possible adoption…

<?php if ( gmdate( 'Ymd' ) < '20241001' ) { ?>
<div class="notice notice-warning"><p><?php echo __( sprintf( '⚠️ This plugin will no longer be updated, other than for critical security issues. In December 2024, it will be formally closed. It has been tested up to PHP 7.4 and WordPress 6.4, and this will not change. <a href="%s">Find out more here</a>, including, if you are a developer, how you can adopt it.', 'https://wordpress.org/support/topic/important-please-read-before-posting-5/' ), 'artiss-currency-converter' ); ?></p></div>
<?php } ?>

However, if all else failed, this code was added too. After October 2024, it was due to show a non-dismissible message on all admin screens, stating the imminent closure of the plugin and that they should fine an alternative.

function occ_add_admin_notice() {

	if ( gmdate( 'Ymd' ) >= '20241001' && is_admin() ) {
		echo '<div class="notice notice-error"><p>';
		echo __( sprintf( '⛔️ The Open Currency Converter plugin will be discontinued December 2024. After this time there will be no further updates, including security vulnerabilities. It is important that you disable it and find an alternative plugin before then. <a href="%s">Find out more here</a>.', 'https://wordpress.org/support/topic/important-please-read-before-posting-5/' ), 'artiss-currency-converter' );
		echo '</p></div>';
	}
}

add_action( 'admin_notices', 'occ_add_admin_notice' );

In the case of both pieces of code, they pointed back to the pinned support notice that I detailed earlier.

An adoption form

In that support forum message, I ask anyone interested in adoption to “get in touch”. That links to a special form that I created just for this purpose.

You can visit it here, but essentially it’s a contact form which asks for

• Their name
• The plugin they want to adopt (selectable from a drop-down)
• Their email address (so I can reply to them!)
• Their WordPress profile
• Their Github profile
• Any further comment they want to make

The profile requests (the first of which is required) allow me to check that they’re suitable. Just like adopting children, I want to make sure they’ll make good parents. Are they a developer? Do they already have plugins? How is their customer support?

Both of the adoptions that I’ve accepted have come through this method.

Handing over your plugin

So, assuming you’ve agreed to handover your plugin to another developer, what do you need to do? Well, I’m going to show my process, albeit not all of it will apply to you, or there may be more that you need to do.

1. I make final change to the plugin, and push to SVN…
   • Remove the adoption messages code
   • Remove the adopt-me tag from the README
   • Remove and/or replace anything you don’t want to the new owner to have (e.g. personalised icons)
   • Update the author and contributor names in the README and plugin meta to that of the new owner (I might also update author URLs and the such too)
2. Remove my pinned message from the support forum and unsubscribe from the forum
3. Add the new developer as a committer. Head to the Advanced View option on the plugin screen on wordpress.org to do this – the option is in the sidebar
4. Now, I transfer ownership. This is in same Advanced View screen but is on the main part of the page under the title “THE DANGER ZONE”. I’ll supply the new owner’s user name to do this.
5. I now remove yourself as a committer – hover over your name (under “committers”) in the sidebar and will find a link to “remove”

I also host my code on Github so do the following…

1. Sync my local code and then remove the local repo
2. Create a new release for the latest version of the code
3. Head into Settings and scroll down to “Danger Zone”
4. Select “Transfer ownership” and follow that through to transfer it to the new owner
5. Change the repo “Watch” option to “Participating and @mentions” and remove the star (if either are applicable)