Pier #170 – New MailerPress Chapter, Next Etch & VF Framework Launch, TranslatePress for Shopify, FleekDash Adds Multisite Network Manager

Ahoi.dev
Stefan from Ahoi.dev   |   The Pier #170   |   September 18, 2026

Welcome to the 170th issue of The Pier. FleekDash has released the Multisite Network Manager. It enables you to transform a single WordPress site into a full network without having to edit the wp-config file or access the traditional Network Setup screen. From the Network Admin drawer, you can manage sites, users, themes, and plugins, add subsites, control network-wide themes and plugins, and edit each site without leaving FleekDash. The Menu Management drawer has been upgraded to become a full builder for top-level items, nested submenus, section titles, spacing and icons. Finally, RTL support has been added.

App Security: Patchstack is opening early access to a new security feature that has been specifically designed for JS-based (AI-generated) apps.

New Chapter: MailerPress has introduced a new identity and website. In the coming weeks, version 2.1 of the WordPress email and newsletter plugin will be released, including the following new features: Conditional Block Display, Migration Center, Contact Engagement, A/B Testing, Automation Goals and One-Click Unsubscribe.

Open Beta: Developed by the team behind Voxel, VX Framework is finally in open beta. Designed as a data modelling layer for agentic WordPress, it supports Gutenberg, Bricks, Oxygen Builder and Breakdance. LTD is available.

Milestones: Next Bricks v3 is out! Additionally, TranslatePress turned nine this year and now powers close to 500,000 WordPress sites.

Multilingual Stores: With the new TranslatePress Shopify app, you can easily automatically translate your store using AI and then manage and refine those translations whenever you need to.

Events: LatePoint 5.7.0 introduces the new ‘Events’ feature. You can now host workshops, webinars and other events with capacity limits (as mentioned in The Pier #168).

Sneak Peek: Components & Slots for Divi 5. Watch this video to find out more.

New Releases: Meow Mailer is a new, free SMTP plugin that allows you to send emails from your WordPress site through your existing provider, such as Mailgun, Brevo, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Gmail or Microsoft 365. It comes with a real log, one-click resending and failure alerts. Meow Apps has also released the Workspace app for iPhone and Android. It essentially provides access to the AI engine that is already running on your site.

Here is a selection of the latest and greatest blog posts we published this week on Ahoi.dev. You will also find some interesting industry news, the latest directory listings on The Port, job openings, and more. Enjoy!

Next Etch
©Next Etch Now Available

🔥 Next Etch Launch

Next Etch is officially live! It introduces the Next Bricks approach to Etch, offering over 200 beautiful components designed specifically for Etch and categorized into eight categories.

It also comes with Animator, a fully integrated GSAP animation panel inside the builder. Don’t miss out on the LTD!

Location Portfolio
Location Portfolio ©EmbedMyReviews

👋 New: Multi-Location Reporting

EmbedMyReviews has released new Location Portfolio and Multi-Location Reporting (aka per-branch reporting) features (aka per-branch reporting) for its white-label reputation management platform. These features have been designed for agencies whose clients have multiple branches, chains or franchises.

The ‘All Locations’ view now includes a detailed table for each location showing reviews gained, average rating, response rate, star distribution, and change compared with the previous period.

You can also set a review target for each location and easily identify which branches are underperforming before the end of the month.

Locations that require action are automatically flagged. This includes branches with a falling rating, unanswered reviews, no connected review source, or a stalled review sync. Multi-location reporting is now carried through into reports and shared dashboards.

In other news, Google Business Profile performance can now be broken down by individual branch, including views, searches, calls and direction requests.

Finally, a new agency-wide Location Portfolio page has been added to the Business section. This gives agencies one place to see every customer, every location, which accounts are growing and which accounts may need a call.

Per-Prize Redirects
Send Your Winners Exactly Where You Want Them ©Claspo

👋 New: Per-Prize Redirects

With Claspo, you can now set a landing page for each prize, so you can choose where winners go right after they win. You can choose any page that appears after the game. Heading into peak season? Simply send each winner straight to the products their discount applies to while their intent to buy is at its highest.

You can also launch A/B tests from any pop-up in just two clicks, with no need to build a second pop-up. Select a strategy and Claspo will set up the variants for you, including the best time to show, different triggers, the teaser and its position, and different designs of the same pop-up. You can also test up to five variations at once (A, B, C, D and E), not just A and B.

Finally, exit intent now works better on mobile, allowing you to catch visitors who are about to leave on mobile devices as well as desktop.

🗞️ Bites & Pieces

WordPress

Meta Box adds a new UI for creating custom models and editing custom table columns. This makes managing models and custom tables easier and more intuitive.

Novamira Pro 1.10.0 now includes specializations for 11 of the most popular third-party Elementor plugins, including Dynamic Content for Elementor, JetElements, Ultimate Addons, Happy Addons, Unlimited Elements, Qi Addons, Element Pack, HT Mega, PowerPack, Piotnet Addons and Xpro.

GenerateBlocks Pro 2.8 completes its Styles Builder updates by introducing Design Tokens, which provide next-level design controls.

With Breakdance 3.0 Beta 9, your AI agent can build loops, global blocks, dynamic data and entrance animations in a single HTML-to-page call. It also features Tailwind-style class names, a preview chooser for Global Blocks that can be edited inline, Modern Normalize, and the theme is now disabled by default for new installations.

The WPForms Dashboard is your new home for forms, offering stats, the latest entries, suggested next steps and more. Also included in WPForms Lite.

You can now connect Pusher Channels to Kirki. Once configured, you can see other users’ cursor activity in real time when working on the same page. The component editor now displays your component across all breakpoints simultaneously, directly on the canvas. In addition, component fields now support dynamic content.

Directorist releases the Pay Per Lead extension, which allows you to generate revenue from every listing enquiry. When a visitor submits an enquiry from a listing page, the listing owner can immediately view the non-locked details, while the fields you mark as ‘locked’ stay hidden until the owner pays to unlock that specific lead. You can charge a flat fee per lead or a commission.

Mosaic 1.0.8 is now available in 22 languages.

FluentAuth 3.0 features include passkeys, two-factor authentication (2FA) by role, brute-force limits per IP address and per account, IP block and allow lists, and more.

E-Commerce & A/B Testing

SureCart 4.8.0 introduces a modern DataViews list experience to the rest of the SureCart admin pages. Also new is fully client-side, single-page application (SPA)-like navigation across the SureCart admin.

You can now set up Sigmize and connect it to your site from within WordPress via a self-serve onboarding process powered by ZipWP. There is now also a new WordPress dashboard widget that provides an at-a-glance summary of your site’s testing.

With multi-currency support, flexible checkout addresses and simplified regional tax handling, Kirki eCommerce Alpha 4 gives you reach and control over your store.

Bundlefic is a new, complete product bundle builder for WooCommerce.

Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) now lets you customize your checkout page layout with new inner blocks.

CartDance 2.0 introduces the long-awaited feature of making SureCart elements available directly within the Breakdance interface.

Donations & Fundraising

The new Donor Comments field in SureDonation 1.6.0 enables supporters to add a note to their donation, providing a straightforward means of sharing the reasons behind their contribution. You can also accept donations in Polish Złoty. Pro 1.2.0-beta adds support for native email marketing integrations, including Mailchimp, Brevo, Kit, ActiveCampaign and MailerLite. Donor comments are now available for recurring donations.

Marketing Attribution

Usermaven introduces custom attribution models, which allow you to build attribution models around how your customers convert. You can then use Reverse ETL to send attribution data directly to HubSpot.

Affiliate Marketing

Partnero introduces automation drill-down logs. Each automation now includes a full activity log. Click on the number of triggers to view a paginated record showing who was affected, when, and the action taken, such as adding a tag, sending an email, converting a lead, or deleting a customer.

Communities, Memberships & Comments

SureDash 1.12.0 introduces a new Summarize Posts feature. A new button on long discussions allows members to access an AI-written summary of the key points, enabling them to decide in seconds whether to read the entire thread. The summary is generated once and reused for everyone, and is updated automatically when the post is edited.

Sales Outreach & GTM

Sendr adds a new Sentiment Analysis feature to its Unibox. It now tells you who’s worth pursuing before you even open a thread. Every first reply is tagged the moment it arrives, so you can skip straight to the important information. Unibox now analyses the sentiment of each contact’s initial response and automatically categorizes it as ‘Interested’, ‘Not Interested’, ‘Meeting Booked’ or ‘Out of Office’.

CRM

Groundhogg 4.8 introduces AI agents and MCP support for your WordPress CRM. Additionally, a calendar view has been added to Broadcasts, and the contact activity timeline is now clearer and faster.

Event Calendars

Schedule-X introduces a new Gantt chart that allows you to display and edit project tasks, milestones, dependencies, progress, constraints and business calendars. This premium feature requires an active licence.

Laravel

Fuzz introduces coverage-guided fuzz testing to Pest 5. It generates its own inputs and monitors which code paths they reach, identifying edge cases that would never occur to you to test.

PayZephyr is a Laravel payments package that puts one fluent API in front of eight payment providers, including Paystack, Stripe, PayPal, Flutterwave, Square, Monnify, OPay, and Mollie.

Web & App Development

NativePHP Mobile 4.4.0 is out! It features browser-like text whitespace and scoped Android app links, as well as structural Info.plist merges for plugins.

SEO

SureRank 1.10.1 introduces a dedicated AI management screen. SureRank Premium 1.9.1 now allows you to filter links in the Link Manager by post type, category and tag. This is particularly useful if you manage a content-heavy site with hundreds of internal links, as it makes finding links within a specific section much faster.

Project Management

Nifty‘s new developer portal is now live, offering a comprehensive public v3 API reference, a Postman collection, a webhook event catalogue and guides on getting started, authentication and OAuth 2.1. API tokens and OAuth app registration are now also available to all workspaces.

Customer Support

Fluent Support 2.4.0 introduces advanced reporting, rebuilt from the ground up, and adds an AI-powered ticket audit. Additionally, reCAPTCHA protection has been added to the ticket form on your customer portal.

LMS / E-Learning

ThriveCart Academy introduces a new customizable student homepage, custom domains, and better course organisation. Product bundles are curated digital course collections that are sold together as a single package at a combined or discounted price directly from ThriveCart checkouts.

Klasio now supports four new local payment gateways, including Paystack, PayFast, EPS and Xendit.

Voice Notes

AudioPen releases automatic note tagging and text snippets in the iOS keyboard. Additionally, cloud transcription is now available on iOS, macOS, Windows and Android.

Animated Icons

Lordicon redesigns the existing System Family set, adding over 500 new icons with many more to come.

Server Management

Switching server panels always involved migration. This involved setting up a new server, copying over files, exporting and importing databases, and moving DNS. Good news: Ploi can now take over a server that has been set up by Laravel Forge or ServerPilot. You can keep the same machine and IP address, meaning there is no need to change the DNS and visitors will never land on the wrong server.

Social Media

Larkpulse by Giststack introduces AI comment replies, AI-powered first comments and direct TikTok publishing. Watch this video to find out more.

WhatsApp Automation

With the new Cloud Storage Backup feature in Pabbly Chatflow, you can automatically back up your chats and media to Cloudflare R2 or Amazon S3.

Email

Mailercloud adds a new suppression list to its Email API platform. If an email address hard bounces or if a recipient marks your email as spam, they will now add that address to a suppression list and stop sending emails to it.

Digital Signage

Juuno releases new Google Reviews app.

Reputation Management

EmbedMyReviews introduces a white-label website builder that has been completely rebuilt. It comes with three completely different themes and new website blocks, including a ‘Free Report Lead Magnet’ block, to help you build your agency website with ease. In addition, you can now sell your services directly from your clients’ dashboard. These include Google Business Profile management, strategy calls, courses and ‘remove branding’ add-ons. Finally, photos that customers attach to their Google reviews can now appear in your review widgets.

From the Editor: Biff.codes

We’ve launched a new side project called Biff.codes, a free job board for WordPress developers and more. Find out why Biff can get paid in burgers. 🍔

🚨 Latest Posts

The following highlighted articles have been published in the last 7 days. All posts can be found on our blog.

WordPress

Conversion Bridge: New GA Dashboard & Linked Journeys

Derek from Conversion Bridge has just released version 1.16 of his WordPress analytics and conversion tracking plugin. This update introduces a new Google Analytics dashboard and linked conversion journeys, as well as…

Customer Support

Gleap Introduces Kai PM for AI-Powered Roadmap Management

Kai is Gleap‘s AI copilot for support agents. Kai PM is a new feature that reads every feature request, scores it against your goals and takes care of the obvious…

Email Marketing, WordPress

SureContact Introduces Link Actions In Email Builder

The SureContact team has added link actions, automation export and import, and campaign auto-save to its email marketing automation platform.

Community Platforms, WordPress

FluentCommunity Releases Pages for Spaces

Jewel from FluentCommunity has released version 2.10.0 of the WordPress community plugin, which introduces pages for your spaces.

Job Boards, SaaS

Job Boardly: New Offline Mode, Team Notification Settings & IndexNow

Nelson from Job Boardly has released a new offline mode, team notification settings and IndexNow support for the no-code job board builder SaaS.

WordPress

Unblock Ships Ready-Made Pattern Library for WordPress

A lot has happened since we first featured Unblock in The Pier #152 back in May. Loïc has just released the first release candidate for the single-block approach, which can…

eCommerce, WordPress

FluentCart Now Supports Product Videos

Jewel from FluentCart has just added support for product videos to its e-commerce plugin for WordPress, which is powered by FluentPlayer.

👋 Latest Jobs

Looking for a new professional challenge? Find your new job.

🔥 Quayside Deals

A few irresistible offers that might be of interest to you, don’t you think?

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That’s all for this week. We hope you enjoyed the 170th issue of The Pier. Until next week! Please tell your friends about The Pier if you like it.

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