Hello everyone! It’s been a while since we’ve posted on our site as we’ve been using our Slack #announcements channel along with our Twitter/Facebook for most communications lately.

Unfortunately our primary sponsor Automattic has notified us that they will be ending their sponsorship of Pods. They want to focus their funding on Gutenberg-native projects and we know that Gutenberg needs more diverse solutions right now. Pods is pretty awesome but it’s also way far beyond just Gutenberg-only. We understand their decision and this change in sponsorship is on good terms. The big problem here is that Automattic provides about 90% of our current funding..

What does this mean?

First, this means that we’ll be needing to find more donors and/or sponsors to replace that funding. It takes a lot of time to keep a project like Pods well-supported in Slack and on the WordPress.org forums, all-the-while keeping maintenance releases going out and making progress on features like Groups, Repeatable Fields, and Repeatable Groups (Loop Fields). Pods is free and we rely on the support of our Friends of Pods to keep it alive and active. We need to hit our fundraising goals for 2020 soon if we want to ensure the future longevity and support of the project long-term. We have three big feature releases planned in 2020 and the lack of funding could set us back significantly as we start to hit our stride on development.

What can you do to help?

You might choose to become a Friend of Pods by donating a recurring monthly/annual amount or even a one-time amount. Ways to make this easier for companies that use Pods for their clients might be to earmark $XX on each project that uses Pods so that it goes towards your continued donations.

Is money tight? That’s okay! Try spreading the word about Pods. Let your clients know they can donate to Pods and the value/benefits of their contribution to our project.

Have some extra time? Consider jumping into our #core Slack channel. On Mondays during our weekly check-ins at 11am Central Time — hop in and let us know that you’d like to help. We can direct you to some areas that we need the most help on and you could be one of the people making a big impact on Pods. Examples: Code [Backend, Frontend/UI, React], Accessibility, Design, Community Support, Documentation, Tutorials, etc

Let’s get together and see what we can do, it’s not impossible especially if we manage to increase the number of people who are donating. We have 80k+ active installations of Pods and if we could manage to get 1% of the owners of those installations to donate $5 monthly, we could quickly have enough funding to sustain our ongoing growth and then some!

What is our goal?

Our new goal is to get to 200 donors. We have 38 right now, so we have a ways to go in 2020 to become sustainable. Become a Friend of Pods >>