Task descriptions

Hi Mark,

Although I don’t necessarily agree that each task needs to have a description (if something isn’t obvious from the task title, you can put as much content as you want in the sheet description to explain thing), I do think it would be nice if tasks were their own object that could be pre-defined and then assigned and re-used on as many sheets as possible.

However, right now, these things are certainly very low on my priority list for a couple of reasons:

1. The PTA plugins, including the paid extensions, currently don’t generate any income… certainly not enough to cover the time I put into them. So, my priority goes to things like the WooCommerce plugins that people are willing to pay for.

2. The underlying structure of the Volunteer plugin really needs to be totally redone. It started life as another plugin that I forked into my own thing when I was first getting started and needed something custom for our school PTA web site. However, knowing what I do now, if I had the chance/time, I would totally rewrite the plugin from scratch, breaking apart sheets, tasks, dates, times, into their own classes/objects, with proper interfaces and relations to make everything much more flexible, and to be able to do things like real recurring events with exceptions (like Google Calendar), volunteer time tracking, tasks that can be assigned to any sheet, etc. I’ve had a lot of ideas and have thought about this quite a bit, and may some day totally rewrite and create a more “pro” version (for sale) if the demand continues to increase and I think that I can at least break even on my time.

Of course, the free version of the plugin is open source, so any other developer can contribute, or fork it into their own plugin. I certainly couldn’t afford to pay you to add some features right now, because I don’t make any money from the plugin. But, if you wish to contribute, I have already accepted code contributions from other programmers.

Happy to accept any contributions, although you may rethink things when you take a look at the current code! =) It’s definitely been hacked together in a not very organized fashion, and is desperately in need of re-factoring and a more object oriented approach. It was my first plugin, and, as stated above, was a plugin from another developer first… I just modified and added to it as needed. At this point, it’s not worth it for me to refactor and organize the code in a better way, as if I took the time to do that, then I might as well re-write the data structure and create a much more flexible/powerful plugin. Just don’t think it would sell enough to make it worth the time since the majority of users are volunteer organizations that don’t want to pay for anything.