The New Year is here and we wish you health, success, and fun! 2016 is a great year for Meta Box when it reached 200.000 active installs (counted by WordPress.org), excluding users who are using Meta Box as a included module in themes. That is a double from the last year! And we want to say thank you to you all to support us and help us make the software a better tool for both developers and users.
2016 in numbers
In 2016, we had 14 releases this year with 2 minor versions: 4.8 and 4.9. All of them are big improvements for the plugin, some highlights include:
- Rewrite the way the plugin loads file, which uses the autoloading feature which prevents loading files twice and saves memory.
- Make the
wysiwyg(editor) cloneable (repeatable). - All HTML5 input types (week, month, etc.) are supported.
- Fully compatible with WPML (officially supported by WPML team).
There are also huge improvements for date/time picker, media (file, image) and object (user, taxonomy, post) fields that we want to bring more options to users while keeping the codebase similar (and small). You might want to see how good the codebase of Meta Box is.
This year, we also released 5 extensions and a Developer Bundle. We now support more meta types in WordPress for users and terms. We also support REST API in WordPress which we think will be a great thing for developers who use WordPress as an application.
Plan for 2017
In the next year, we have some ideas in our head and want to make them real. Most important things we think are:
- Improve the codebase of Meta Box (as always), making it smaller, more structured and easier to understand (so developers can easily extend it).
- Release at least 5 extensions, some of them will be for developers, and some for users. We also will try to use Meta Box to make useful plugins for end-users as well.
- Write more tutorials to help users to leverage all the features of the plugin and improve the documentation to show them to the users. Some users don't know features already exist in Meta Box! (Yes, we have a lot of powerful options).
- Improve the UI of Meta Box, making it look more beautiful.
- Improve the Builder extension that can work with all extensions.
- Making the online generator that you can use to generate code for Meta Box faster!
We're expanding our development team, and we hope that will bring more energy and speed up the development process.
And thank you again for being with us in this year. And Happy New Year!
Meta Box 2017 Year in Review and What's Next for 2018? 
WordPress Beginner Guide for Meta Box