Honing Our Focus

Jack of all trades, master of none. It means you’re competent in a variety of subjects, but not an expert in any one subject. I feel like you could apply this to Tournamatch’s development and list of supported CMSs. I’m a huge fan of including people. Including people just makes them feel great. I enjoy making folks happy which also explains my desire to include people. Over the years, this meant building out support of Tournamatch so that you can use it with any CMS system written in PHP. As of today, the exact same source code in Tournamatch works on WordPress, phpBB, PHP-Nuke, and a couple others I’ve neglected to publicize. Like a library you include in your source code with a package manager, except at a larger scale and Tournamatch integrates well enough in each system to appear native.

My ambition to support every customer’s needs has had consequences. In none of those systems does Tournamatch integrate the way the system was designed to use plugins. This has been a challenging hill to climb, especially in WordPress. Too often my time is spent overcoming these challenges instead of building or growing the software. In WordPress for example, the biggest issues standing in front of us right now plugin compatibility, distribution, and localization. Neither of those issues exist if Tournamatch were a native WordPress plugin instead of bridge to another PHP-powered CMS.

I’ve evaluated solutions to these glaring issues for well over a year. The best solution I keep coming back to is to build a native plugin. I’ve been reluctant to pull the trigger on this because it means dropping support for our other systems. This is a tough decision, but it’s important for the health of this project to focus on just one system in the near term future. All development resources moving forward are focused on making a truly native Tournamatch solution for WordPress. I’ll provide more details soon. In the meantime, know that if you are on WordPress, you shouldn’t be impacted. Your experience moving forward should only improve. If you are using one of the other systems, consider switching to WordPress. The copy that you have will continue to work on non-WordPress websites, but we will no longer offer technical support or updates for those other systems.

Thank you always for the support, and we apologize to the folks that will be excluded by this decision. We’re excited about the future and hope you’ll make the switch to grow with us. Cheers!