PublishPress Acquires MetaSlider

PublishPress is known for its plugins for publishing, managing and scheduling content in WordPress, including Authors, Capabilities, Revisions, Series, and more.

They have just announced the acquisition of the popular MetaSlider and MetaSlider Lightbox plugins. They acquired it from Extendify, who took over the plugin from UpdraftPlus in September 2020.

MetaSlider Acquisition

“Most of my favorite publishers also have beautiful photography with their stories. From big WordPress publishers such as Outside Magazine to small start-ups such as TheNarwhal, the photos often add as much as the text. We hope to build tools to help publishers showcase their images.”

– Steve Burge, Founder of PublishPress

With over 700,000 installs, MetaSlider is one of the most popular WordPress plugins for creating sliders, slideshows, carousels and galleries.

PublishPress has exciting plans for the future development of MetaSlider. They plan to use it as a platform for building a whole suite of image tools. For starters, they plan to expand MetaSlider’s dynamic content features and improve the speed and performance of the plugin.

MetaSlider will not be included in PublishPress plans, but will remain as a separate brand. Prices will remain the same, but will include features in the future. If that’s not good news!

What’s More?

October saw the release of PublishPress Blocks 3.0, which introduces a new user interface very similar to that of all other PublishPress plugins as well as a new dashboard. There you can enable or disable each of the main features with a simple click, e.g. Block Permissions, Block Styles and Block Controls.

They are also working on a completely new way to create PublishPress author profiles. It is a new design tool with many configuration options and a preview feature.

Lastly, the free version of PublishPress Series just got even better. It is a publishing plugin that allows you to organise posts into issues or series. It has just received several new features that were previously only included in the Pro version of the plugin. This includes Series Categories, Manage Series and ordering of series and categories via drag and drop.