There was a nice anniversary last week: A little bit over one year ago, the first version of WP-Table Reloaded was released in the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Since then, the plugin has steadily received attention and has become very popular:

• over 85000 downloads
• about 90 ratings
• with an average rating of 96.4%
• 14 available translations
• over 1300 comments on this website
• almost 200 threads in the WordPress Support Forums
• countless emails with questions, suggestions, ideas, bugs, feedback, and praise

At this point, the first birthday of WP-Table Reloaded, I’d like to say THANK YOU to everybody in the community who made this possible. This includes (I hope I don’t forget anyone :-) ) the users, the supporters, the code contributors, the beta-testers, the bug reporters, the translators, and especially the people who donated or sent me a gift. Thank you all very much!

Let’s hope that these numbers while have increased for the second birthday. I still have ideas for future versions, so stay tuned! :-)

One consequence of this popularity is the steadily growing amount of support requests. I’ll generally try to answer each single one of them quickly and with a precise and good answer, and I believe that I was pretty successful with that so far. However, it is getting harder and harder to keep up with the high number of questions that people have, and which I accepted in different ways: through email, comments, and the support forums. Unfortunately, my available free time does no longer permit this dedication, as I’m busy with other things outside of WordPress, too, like my studies and my great job.

Therefore, I will incorporate a change to my support handling policy: I would like to get more people involved in answering support questions, in areas where this is possible. For that, from now on, the WordPress Support Forums will be the primary place to ask support questions and receive answers. I will close the support comments section on this site, but will leave the existing ones for reference. Additionally, I will no longer answer support questions that come in by email, except if I asked for them, or if they contain bug reports or sensitive information that shall not be publicly available.
I’m doing this to gather all support questions in one place, where others (and I) have a better overview about them. This will hopefully lead to other people helping out with answering questions. So, if you know the answer to, e.g., a styling question, please feel free to answer such questions. I will still monitor the Support Forums and try to provide answers as my time permits, of course.
Hopefully, this will keep up the current level of support, which I could not uphold otherwise.
Maybe I can also use the approach that other plugin authors have incorporated: Donations can be made encourage support for specific questions.

Thanks a lot for your understanding!

And now let’s celebrate the first birthday of WP-Table Reloaded! :-)