Back in episode 78 of WordPress Weekly, I had the chance to interview Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress to talk about their work with college publishing. Unfortunately, news has come out today that CoPress is shutting down operations. The two major reasons cited for the closure are lack of financial sustainability and a support system that didn’t scale well.
What this ultimately meant was a rapidly growing number of emails for us to answer. Needless to say, it’s become difficult to make this scale in any meaningful way. Our eventual goal was to build software for distributed support, but the resources required for hosting and support severely challenged our ability to make headway on the project.
One of the biggest perks that CoPress offered was a conversion mechanism to take sites that were using College Publisher and convert them to WordPress. CoPress will be be publishing their conversion script as open-source allowing other individuals to pick up where they left off.
I wish the owners of CoPress the best of luck in future endeavors.
Alas, a lot of software developers discover that the real problem is not creating good software, but supporting it. I’m sorry to hear about CoPress. I remember listening to that episode and thinking they had a good service.
CoPress was one of my favorite WP related service providers out there and was quote inspirational in a way. I feel very sorry they are cosing down.
@Sallie Goetsch (rhymes with ’sketch’) – This is probably the number one problem that plagues any software, paid or free. Seems like their is never an easy solution to this particular problem except for more elbow grease.
@Banago – Yeah, when I interviewed the on the show, they were in good spirits and I still think they did a great job with TheFairField Mirror website. Really glad to see they opened up their conversion script to the public for open source. That’s like going out on top.