Meta Box 4.12 Released

We're happy to announce the release of Meta Box 4.12 today. This is a minor update with a big improvement for the meta storage and some interesting features. If you're using old version of Meta Box, please update now.

Storage

We've been working on making an abstraction layer between meta boxes / fields and the meta storage in WordPress. This helps us adding / adapting the storage for other uses such as for term meta, user meta or even settings pages. Thus, reduce a lot of code duplication and improve the performance a lot.

While doing this, we tried hard to keep the backward compatibility. That means if you update Meta Box to the latest version, while still using old versions of MB Term Meta or MB User Meta, it's just fine. They will work without any problem. But you should update them as that can increase the performance a lot!

We're working on premium extensions at the moment to refactor them to use the new storage methods. A lot of the code will be removed! We'll release them very soon.

Better UX

We also improved the UX of some fields, making them more user friendly. That includes the oembed field, where you don't need to click the Preview button to see the video anymore. Or the image_advanced, image_upload (plupload_image) fields, where clicking on the uploaded image pops up a modal for re-selecting the image.

It's also worth noting that we tried to mimic the DOM elements of the media items for the uploaded images and files. The markup, CSS classes and even the loading icon. Everything looks so close to WordPress's UI.

Opacity for color picker

Another interesting feature in this release is the alpha channel in the color picker. We added a new parameter alpha_channel for color field. When it's true, you can select colors with opacity.

This feature is requested by our users on Github and we're happy to add it.

If you have any ideas or how to improve the code, please let us know. Any feedback is welcomed.

Again, please update to the latest version and enjoy the plugin!