Stream is one of those plugins that I’ve always seen the potential in but it’s never quite nailed it. I was a pretty big fan of Stream 1, and I wrote about my experience, but in the end it ended up logging too much and made the stuff I wanted harder to keep.
When Stream 2 came out and it was hosted by them, I had renewed interest. However, my migration to the hosted setup didn’t go well and I ended up abandoning it altogether. Apparently, others also didn’t always have a great experience — despite a stellar team working on it. Luke Carbis describes the Stream 2 failure in surprising detail within the Stream 3 announcement.
Stream 3 goes “back to the basics,” and the plugin is now self-hosted again, and it will be free moving forward. Stream will also now be part of XWP, the WordPress arm of X-Team — which I think is really X-Company, but either way it’s a company of nice people whose overall structure never ceases to confuse me.
Luke calls the plugin, “akin to Akismet or Jetpack,” and I actually agree with him in regard to its potential. I’m certainly going to try it again now that it’s on version 3 and self-hosted again. But I a bit concerned if it’ll be able to be improved significantly now that it’s free only and doesn’t have a business model. Maybe as a free plugin on Github the contributions from outside folks will pick up to compliment XWP’s work and it will become the really great tool I always hoped it could be.
Jonathan Wold from XWP here. Thanks so much for the coverage! A few thoughts in response:
X-Company founded XWP and our sibling companies, X-Team, XHTMLized and WP Stream. The new âWho We Areâ page on our website (https://xwp.co/who-we-are/) should help clear the history up.
XWP has been close to Stream since itâs creation. Many from our team have contributed to Stream. We have always believed in itâs potential and want to see it succeed. X-Company, the founder of and investor in Stream, decided to put Stream into our care to run with it.
Our plan is to fund Stream through a combination of custom development (for enterprise customers) and our own sponsorship. We dedicate a portion of our profits to fund initiatives we believe benefits the community as a whole (such as contributing to WP Core) and we consider Stream a great match.
We know Stream has a lot of value to offer to folks who use WordPress and we want to see Stream become ubiquitous throughout the WordPress community. We believe the key to making Stream a success is an âopenâ approach where we are actively collaborating with others who see the value in Stream for their own projects.