Meta Box 2020 in Review and 2021 Plan

2020 was a tough time for everyone due to COVID-19. The pandemic caused a lot of difficulties for Meta Box and Meta Box users. However, we have endeavored to overcome and tried to support our users at our best. We have achieved many successes in 2020, and also, plan to do many things for our users in 2021.

Review What Meta Box Achieved in 2020

Interesting Numbers

Although the Covid-19 has badly affected the global economy, luckily, Meta Box still has growth with:

• An 11% increase in total revenue.
• A 16% increase in the number of purchases.
• The value per purchase/user was approximately similar to the value per purchase in 2019.
• The increased number of followers via email, social media, … was similar to other years.
• Notably, we had new 100.000 active installations in just 11 months - 1 month earlier than last year. So on January, 29th 2021, Meta Box officially has 600.000+ active installations on wordpress.org.

These fantastic numbers can’t be achieved without the support of our users, especially those who already had got Meta Box before, and kept using and upgrading the bundle in 2020. Thank you so much for supporting and staying with us.

As for Meta Box editorial team, we tried our best to understand user’s needs to write more helpful tutorials and case studies:

• 19 Meta Box case studies for various applications and industries like OTA website, hotel booking, displaying banners, creating user profiles, FAQs pages,  …
• 31 tutorials and guides on using Meta Box and many other tools
• And many other honest and deep reviews, analysis, …

Besides, we also had interesting developments in Meta Box features and extensions.

New extensions

In 2020, Meta Box released MB Views - a powerful extension to build frontend templates more easily without touching the theme’s file. MB Views promises to change the way you build your frontend and save you a lot of time and effort.

Along with MB Views, we launched some solutions. Solutions are the extensions that give you the ready-to-use features to use without any configuration (to understand more about solutions, you should refer to this article). Here are our first 3 solutions:

• MB Testimonials: choose a pre-built testimonial or create your own one easily
• MB User Avatar:  simply add custom avatars for users in WordPress without using Gravatar
• MB Favorite Posts: allow users to bookmark your posts as favorites and view them later

New features and update

We added a lot of features and updates for Meta Box and some extensions:

Meta Box:

• Allowed quick define text fields with “name” attribute only.
• Added rwmb_set_meta function to set meta value.
• Added Gutenberg compatibility for validation

Meta Box Geolocation:

• Now support Open Street Maps
• Added 2-way binding data in Meta Box Geolocation

MB Custom Post Type:

• Rewrote with React.
• Can work independently from Meta Box core plugin.

Meta Box Builder:

• Rebuilt with React
• Improved UI & UX
• Now support more features
• Added API to extend

MB Frontend Submission:

• Added supports for Ajax and Google reCaptcha
• Added user post dashboard

Meta Box Plan in 2021

In 2021, Meta Box team is going to enhance the plugin and all extensions. Here are what we are planning to do:

First of all, maintaining the current extensions is essential. The maintenance is going to include updating some features required by our users in the forum or in the Facebook group. Although they’re just some “small” features, we take them seriously because “small” doesn’t totally mean “minor”. So if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to tell us and we will try our best to give you the best experience.

Secondly, we are going to upgrade the integrations with page builders to have better compatibility, especially Oxygen integration - We know that our users are urging us to do it.

Thirdly, an extension to integrate with Gutenberg (like other page builders integration) is in our plan.

And we also want to create a custom table to save all the post data in a separated table, and support templates on the front end as well.

We are going to create tools to convert data from other plugins easily (like ACF, Toolset, …) as well.

Finally, as you know, in 2020, Meta Box team released 3 new solutions. In 2021, we are going to develop more.

Last words

We’re very grateful to have your support to overcome 2020. And this year, we’re looking for more chances and trying to improve our plugin so that you will receive more conveniences and facilities to develop your business. Thank you again and wish you all a good 2021.