Meta Box 2019 in Review & Plan for 2020

We have been in a new year for a month already. Looking back to 2019, we have some exciting things to share with you. This isn’t a brag. Just want to show you what we’ve reached, together.

2019 In Review

Interesting Numbers

We would love to say that 2019 is a year of stable growth with Meta Box plugin. We kept the products’ improvement the same as last year with the same numbers of new features and extensions as well as reached the announced plan, and all the business indexes are excellent.

We reached 400,000+ active installation in early 2019 and are reaching 500,000+ soon. Our revenue and subscribers still increased regularly. We gained more website traffic and customers as well with the rate of new/returned clients being maintained.

However, the most impressive number that is the user's spending on Meta Box in 2019 is more 20% than 2018. Not only is it about the stats but also our reputation. You, one of our fellows and others out there, made a deeper belief in our products as well as their worth. That’s our honor!

Thank you all 3000 for supporting us all the time!

Next are the wrap-up for the extensions and features released last year.

New Extensions

• MB Blocks - allows developers to create custom Gutenberg blocks with ease. No need to setup React or Webpack anymore. This extension also integrates with Meta Box Builder extension to allow you to build blocks visually.
• Meta Box – SearchWP Integrator - allows users to search through the content of all fields, including cloneable and group fields easily.
• MB Core - an All-In-One extension for users who purchased the Core Bundle license. Now you can just install this plugin and have all extensions active.

New Features

Meta Box

• A big update in version 5.0 is that we don’t support PHP < 5.3 anymore. This allows us to improve the code base of the plugin and add more features in the future easier.
• Now supports Ajax load & pagination for post, taxonomy & user field types, which gives a great performance boost on websites that have many items.
• Added sanitization for all fields, which improve the security of the plugin. Developers can define their own sanitization callback or bypass it if needed.
• Improved the update system, which is now available in the free Meta Box plugin. Premium users don’t need to use the standalone Meta Box Updater extension anymore.

MB Settings Page

• Now developers can create panels and sections in the Customizer (we were featured in WPTavern for this!)
• Supports creating network wide settings pages, which means we support network meta
• A new style for left tabs was added along with tab icons
• And developers can now backup and restore settings with ease

Meta Box Builder

• Improved a lot in both code base and UI/UX. We restructured the settings for a field group, improved the import - export feature and improved the field settings panel. The plugin code base was also modernized / modularized to be a lot better than the version 2.x.

Meta Box AIO & MB Core

• Revamped the settings page, which gives you a better interface and experience.
• And now includes free extensions.

There are a lot of smaller improvements we made across the 2019 year such as better compatibility for Elementor, making Conditional Logic works for Gutenberg, or supporting conditional logic for Beaver Themer.

Plan for 2020

The first thing we set in our plan is Views. We are going to launch a new extension for this which helps you to easily show posts and fields in the frontend. This thing may be the most wanted feature that you’re looking for so far.

We also are improving our existing extensions to make them be more powerful as well as add more integration with 3rd-party plugins. You will definitely have more power from Meta Box in the next year.

But wait, we have something more interesting in plan. This is our effort to reduce your time to deal with custom coding when you use Meta Box and its extensions. We’ll keep the last thing a secret then let you know only when we release them. So, keep track on our steps in 2020. We would love to have you by our side.

Cheers for us, cheers for a brilliant 2020!