Fifteen years ago, in Nairobi, a handful of us cracked open a blank dukapress.php file and asked a wild question: “Why shouldn’t any shop-owner, anywhere, spin up a secure online cart in minutes?”
That question became DukaPress 1.0 on 19 August 2010 — fourteen months before WooCommerce was even a fork on GitHub. From day one our ambition was global; duka may mean “shop” in Swahili, but the code never assumed a Kenyan postcode.
What happened next still feels a little unreal:
- Thousands of live stores from Brasília to Bratislava.
- WordCamp Kenya 2011, where a plugin built in Nairobi headlined an international schedule.
- Community translators who turned our rough strings into German, Spanish and Bahasa.
- A pluggable gateway API that let a Kisumu courier, a Bangkok Stripe account and a Boston fulfilment house all settle the same checkout flow.
- The inevitable 3 a.m. security scramble when TimThumb bit us in 2011 — lesson learned.
Why we’re signing off
By April 2017 our last major tag, v 3.2, landed. WordPress commerce had shifted; Automattic’s resources made WooCommerce the gravitational centre, and our volunteer bandwidth couldn’t stretch to PHP 8 migrations or new payment rails. Rather than drift into quiet breakage, we’re freezing the repo:
- DukaPress is now sunset software.
- No new features, no support nor scheduled patches.
- The docs, changelogs and final ZIPs remain online for historians and nostalgic diff-hunters.
Where to next?
- GitHub mirror –
wp-plugins/dukapressis archived read-only — fork at will. - Migration – WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads both import CSV exports from DukaPress.
Parting thoughts
We built DukaPress to prove world-class code could spring from Kenya as readily as California — and for a bright stretch, it did. Its deeper legacy is the conviction it left in a generation of African engineers: you can start local and aim planetary.
To everyone who installed, forked, translated, criticised or evangelised DukaPress: asante sana. You gave the project its pulse. I leave proud, humbled and fiercely curious about whatever you code next.
See you in the repos.