We hit a bit of a milestone last week here at Hero Plugins – HeroMenu, our very first premium plugin, cracked the 1,000 sale mark.
I thought I would take a look back over the eight months that passed since the launch of HeroMenu (it launched February this year). In an ideal world, it would be possible to launch a product and expect absolutely no complications, but unfortunately any plugin developer knows that his plugin will need to contend with a plethora of different server configurations, hundreds – or possibly thousands – of themes, and more plugins than I can count. All of which presents us with a colossal number of variations that may make some random issue that we never anticipated surface.
It’s obviously not possible to test a plugin for each and every possible setup, and HeroMenu presented its own particular challenge because it required some level of theme integration; it wasn’t long after launch that we received pre-sales questions about HeroMenu’s compatibility with this theme or that theme.
This, of course, required us to do testing with the themes in question, but quite a few theme developers were more than happy to provide us with a copy of their theme for testing and development purposes – devs such as Muffingroup (BeTheme) and Design Themes (Ultimatum) really came to the party and helped us tune HeroMenu to work well with their themes.
In the time since we’ve launched, HeroMenu has undergone just over 40 different interations which has seen numerous fixes and optimizations deployed with a few new features being added. In the same time we have also added 3 additional plugins to the CodeCanyon market.
2015 is rapidly drawing to a close, but we have one more plugin coming that we are pretty excited about. 2016 will see the arrival of our first theme – front-end design is nearly done, and back-end dev will start in November – if everything goes according to plan, we’re looking at launching early 2016.
After all this we’ll be spending a lot of time on refinement – a lot of requested features have been waiting on the backburner, so the focus in 2016 is going to be on adding features and improving existing features in the plugins currently available. The Hero Plugins website will also undergo a major overhaul; we would like to improve the design to make it more user-friendly, and also completely rebuild our documentation section, while adding in a self-help facility and quite a large bunch of tutorial videos for each of our plugins.
Finishing off – it is important that we thank our many supporters who have made use of HeroMenu and our other plugins. Without their feedback, suggestions and comments, we would not have been able to work tirelessly to improve HeroMenu, fix issues and add new features. We are committed, as always, to providing superbly coded plugins that run well, and with providing world-class support. Please keep supporting us, and please check out our other plugins because this is just one very small step at the beginning of a very long journey.