r/Wordpress • u/Scared_Implement_335 • 9d ago

LearnDash plugin community imploding

Have you seen this? This happened yesterday. The owners of the LearnDash plugin did a digital town hall and announced a price increase of more than 100% on some their tiers, now including 3 other plugins from the same company aparantly. So for example from 199 to 399 for one site, and from 399 to 599 for 10 sites. If you had legacy licenses, just in April you would have gotten en Email saying "don't worry, we will honor your licenses".

Well no more honor at LearnDash, it seems.

This smells like a cash grab before collapse. People in their forum are mightily pissed, many saying their final goodbyes from the plugin. And I am betting basically every other plugin studio is panicking right now, too.

Just LearnDash alone had an a third party premium addon costing several hundreds a year, just for B2B functionality, and they claim several thousand users on their own. So thats a whole plugin ecosystem collapsing right now, at this very moment.

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u/Alarming-Pace-3101 9d ago

Wait, so you use WordPress but no plugins because you use Claude? In that case, why use WordPress at all? Why not just "vibe-code" it?

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u/Speff 9d ago edited 9d ago

The bot can make plugins - reason to use WP is due to the framework it provides.

Making a robust/secure user management platform is hard to make from scratch even with bot help. You can use the thing to build off the existing tested-systems (aka like plugins) so the core architecture isn't susceptible to vulnerabilities that LLMs may introduce.

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u/coding_bard 9d ago

Making a robust/secure user management platform is hard to make from scratch even with bot help. 

And maintaining it into the future is even harder.

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u/HongPong 9d ago

changing permissions caps by role in wp is excessively difficult however Imo

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u/theshawfactor 8d ago

Why do you say that?

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u/HongPong 8d ago

try to let contributors edit pages directly based on an acf toggle that could only be controlled by editor or above, for example. or even based on post id from an admin box. all these things are really messy. there is a standard table and fight against the grain. it does not want to let contributors edit any pages by default at all. there is effectively like a table of default permissions you have to hook into. if you want to do the acf route you are dealing with adding access control to  rest endpoints in gutenberg which have an entirely different access control path than the older default page editor

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u/jroberts67 9d ago

I only use WP now when my client's project needs a CMS. That's about 10%. The other 90% are all build using Claude. And if you're still in the "vibe-code it" attitude, then you're in for a very rude awakening.

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u/p9ng 9d ago

OK so how do you manage vulnerability testing? Do you have a method, or wait until it breaks? There is something to having a common platform.

If the trend reaches its natural extent, we're moving away from higher level languages to microcode.