At the 7th of February we had a video call about the wordpress caldera plugin. Which is now maintained by the CiviCRM community.
This call had the purpose to resolve the current state of the maintenance. The current state is that it is maintained by a bunch of people spending their free time on maintaining it and the code base is not an easy one from a maintenance perspective. Also there is lack of funding for spending maintenance time on it.
So there is only one way forward and that is that we acknowledge we are with too few to maintain it properly. However we decided that we try to do our best. So special thanks so far to Kevin Cristiano and Kainuk because they have spent quite a bit of time so far on the finding out how to maintain it properly and creating new release and finding out how to build process works.
The next steps are:
- Release a new version 1.9.8.1 (Kainuk will take care of this). This version will be compatible with PHP 8.1
- Then at some point Kevin Cristiano will try to rename the plugin so it can be published again on wordpress.org
- In the call some people where present who offered to help test the plugin (after the new release and the renaming)
- We will have another video call in 2 to 3 months
Regarding the PHP 8 compatibility there are some reports that the current version 1.9.7 might work as well.
Comments
It also seems that there is a distinction between Caldera Forms itself, and its many addons for payment and various other things. While the ranks of CiviCRM + Caldera users is no doubt dwindling, the usage of any particular Caldera addon is probably getting even thinner. Having unmaintained payment plugins may be dangerous, so it is not clear how much longer we (meaning my org) can continue to rely on the one we are using. In my mind that adds a bit more urgency to this conundrum.