Today I released version 2.0 of the List Authors WordPress widget. The underlying code has in fact existed for quite some time in the form of a patch submitted to WordPress to enhance the abilities of the wp_list_authors template tag. My hope was that the patch would make it into version 3.0 of WP after which I could update my widget to use it. That never happened so I have instead added a custom version of the wp_list_authors function to List Authors plugin.

After several months of tweaking and re-tweaking my patch in response to comments from various WP devs, I was confident that the patch was production-ready. The feature request has been open for over a year with a working patch for six months–at this point, I doubt it will ever be released. Maybe there are legitimate performance concerns with the patch (there aren’t any problems I’m aware of), or maybe the features are just too low in priority. The patch was my attempt at contributing back to an open-source project. After this experience, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed in the whole process. Maybe I’ll try my hand at it again, but it will be with a project other than WordPress.

In the meantime, I hope those using my List Authors widget enjoy the new features of version 2.0.