Completely Refactored, Social Warfare 2.1 is a Stunner

We’ve completely overhauled the code base of Social Warfare and it’s better than ever before!

Since the major release of Social Warfare 2.0 we’ve been working hard to continue optimizing the plugin to perform better than ever before.

We’ve also been working to support, diagnose and fix any and all bugs and conflicts that users have been having with version 2.0 thus far.

While the large majority of our users are able to use Social Warfare without any trouble, there are always a small percentage of users who need our help. With our growing user base, this small percentage of users has grown and it’s been difficult to keep up at times.

One thing we have been highly aware of is that when you work on a product for so long, sometimes you can lose objectivity. It’s easy to get blind-spots when you’ve been building something for an extended period of time and through multiple iterations, updates and upgrades.

So at the beginning of October, we decided to bring in a highly recommended consultant to have a critical look at the code base for Social Warfare.

It was probably the best money we ever spent.

Bringing In a Fresh Set of Eyes

On the recommendation of our Support Superhero, Andrea, we asked Rob Neu of WP Site Care to give Social Warfare a full head-to-toe audit and tell us where we could improve the codebase.

Rob more than delivered on his end of the bargain and with his help we’ve rebuilt the plugin (almost) from the ground up. The major objectives with the refactoring were to:

1. Prevent, fix or eradicate theme/plugin conflicts
2. Optimize sizing and lessen Javascript footprint
3. More tightly adhere to WordPress core code practices
4. Make the plugin easier to develop upon for third-party developers and future add-ons and extensibility

Mission accomplished. And as you can tell from our GitHub activity, it was definitely no small task.

Support System, Inbox Zero

With the refactoring release of Social Warfare 2.1 we wanted to put all hands on deck for our Support System. It was our goal to work tirelessly until all support tickets had been resolved and we once again could end the day with zero support tickets open.

In the last 7 days since release, our team has solved 259 support tickets, and sent over 727 support emails. Last weekend, thanks to Nick putting in some overtime, we managed to hit Inbox Zero for the first time in months.

That feels good.

There are still a handful of support tickets coming and going, but that is expected. No two WordPress installs are the same and have the potential for thousands of theme / plugin / CDN / server conflicts.

So far it looks like version (now released) 2.1.3 has solved 99% of the bugs and conflicts that have been popping up for a small percentage of users.

Onward and Upward

With now more than 8,000+ sites using Social Warfare as their go-to social sharing plugin, we’re more excited than ever to continue shaping the future of our company.

More importantly, we’re more excited than ever to continue developing products that help content creators get more results for the great work they’re doing.