Hey everyone, David here 🙂

For those who don’t know me, I’m the founder of MapSteps and the developer of the Page Builder Framework theme, Ultimate Dashboard, WP Swift Control and a few other WordPress plugins that help agencies & freelancers all around the world to build fast websites & provide their customers with the user experience they deserve.

Earlier this year I’ve taken over the Kirki project from Ari Stathopoulos. The aquisition just made perfect sense as I’ve been using Kirki myself for a couple years now. Kirki is a part of the Page Builder Framework theme that I’ve created.

I always wanted to contribute to Kirki. Unfortunately, I’ve just been too busy with my own projects in the past. That changed when the company grew last year and I saw Ari’s tweet that he’s looking for someone to take over the project.

All the pieces just came together.

In this post I want to give you a quick insight on what we’ve done so far, what we have planned, what issues we’ve faced and what the future of the project will look like.

What we have done so far

After taking over Kirki, the first thing I did was develop the branding. A clean, modern & minimalistic website with an enhanced documentation that now shows previews of all the controls available in Kirki.

I’ve also started collecting emails to be able to directly communicate with Kirki users and to see if there is any interest in the PRO add-on of the plugin.

In fact, Kirki PRO is the very next thing we’ve started to work on.

In the meantime, I made sure Kirki 3 remains compatible with all the latest & greatest WordPress core releases.

What we have planned

The plan for Kirki is relatively simple on paper:

• Redo the website
• Start building an audience
• Maintain Kirki 3
• Release Kirki PRO (short-term goal)
• Explore how Kirki can potentially extend Gutenberg (mid-term goal)
• and eventually release Kirki 4 (long-term goal)

The issues we ran into

It’s safe to say that things didn’t go as we had anticipated and I want to apologize for that. In this section I want to highlight what went wrong and I want to be completely transparent about it.

The person that I worked with left the company and I’m currently operating as a 1-man band. I knew right from the beginning that Kirki would require at least 1 person to work on it part-time for me to be able to achieve the goals above in a timely manner.

We also encountered a couple roadblocks when developing Kirki PRO and had to put the project on hold to focus on our existing products that are already monetized and make the main income source of the company.

The Current State

While I will continue to make sure the plugin is compatible with the latest WordPress core versions, the project & support are currently on hold.

Looking for a Partner

I’m looking for a partner to help develop Kirki & Kirki PRO to take things to the next level. If you’re interested, just drop me a line.

I’m also looking for 2 developers to join the team which would potentially allow us to take on the project again ourselves. Though, since I wasn’t able to get anyone on board the past 2 months, it’s now the right time to exlore partnerships.