Taking Care of Alex’s Plugins

On February 27, 2019, Alex Mills (aka Viper007Bond) passed away at home surrounded by his family after a two and a half year battle with leukaemia.

Alex Mills, Montmorency Falls, Quebec. 2009.

Alex was a gifted developer and a much liked member of the WordPress community. I have always been in awe of everything he did. He contributed to core many times and is listed as a contributor to WordPress 5.1.1 that was released last month. He still has 15 open Trac tickets so I expect to see his name on future releases too. He was the primary author of many plugins as well as contributing to others.

In his last blog post he expressed the wish that his plugins would be maintained and developed.

Since all of my plugins are open-source, they are free to be forked by reputable authors in the WordPress community. It would mean a lot to have my legacy go on.

Alex Mills, February 18th 2019.

I’m glad to say that a team inside Automattic will be taking care of his plugins in the future.

We will fork each of Alex’s GitHub repositories adding them to the Automattic GitHub account. We’ll update any links in his plugin readme files so they’re pointing at the new locations.

A short paragraph about Alex will be added to the plugin readme files. You can see an example on the Regenerate Thumbnails homepage.

We’ll do our best to stay on top of support queries on the forums too. If anyone else wants to help please don’t hesitate to get in touch. I’m donncha on the WordPress.org Slack.

In times gone by authors left works of music, novels, poetry, and letters on their passing. They were static works of art frozen in time. Alex leaves behind his code that will continue to evolve and operate in a living world used by thousands (millions?) of people every day as they go about their online lives.

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Donncha Ó Caoimh is a code wrangler with Automattic, sometimes contributor to WordPress and writer of plugins.