Two years ago today the first version of the oik base plugin was made available on wordpress.org, running on WordPress 3.0.4 It took a long time before it was being downloaded more than once or twice a day, only achieving 838 downloads in its first year. The total downloads of oik reached eventually reached 1,000 on the first of April 2012.
Then in mid April we released the oik-nivo-slider plugin. Suddenly the number of downloads shot up! But oik-nivo-slider was being downloaded twice or even three times the rate of oik. This was an interesting phenomenon; oik-nivo-slider doesn’t work unless oik is installed and activated.
So I developed some dependency logic that enabled a plugin to indicate which other plugin(s) they were dependent upon, prompting the user to install and activate the missing logic. Even today, for every 10 downloads/upgrades of oik there are a dozen downloads/upgrades of the oik-nivo-slider.
After oik-nivo-slider other plugins followed. First there was oik-privacy-policy then soon after cookie-cat, just in time for the softening of the cookie law.
The current version of oik on WordPress.org is v1.17. In this version the child plugins automagically relocate themselves when activated and take on a life of their own, requesting updates from this site.
The next stage of the process is for these child plugins to no longer be delivered as part of the oik base plugin. This is what we’re currently working on: oik version 2.0.
We may even go in for a bit of renaming, from “often included key information” to “oik information kit”.
Also in the pipeline is a new plugin called oik-user. This will make the “often included key information” configurable for each registered user.
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