Used in more than 4 Million sites globally, the collection of builder plugins expands WP Engine’s market-leading portfolio of essential developer tools and investment in the WordPress ecosystem.

WP Engine, the world’s most trusted WordPress technology company, announced it will acquire five of the most popular developer-centric tools for WordPress from Delicious Brains, strengthening the company’s offerings for both traditional and headless managed WordPress. The plugins have a total installed base of approximately 4 million users and are widely adopted by WP Engine’s customers. The acquired software includes Advanced Custom Fields (ACF), WP Migrate, WP Offload Media, WP Offload SES, and Better Search Replace.

Marketing Technology News: Emarsys: Americans More Excited Than Brits for the Queen’s Jubilee!

“ACF, WP Migrate and all of these plugins are tools the modern WordPress developer can’t live without”

Beloved Developer-centric Tools

The acquisition of these widely-used WordPress plugins will expand WP Engine’s portfolio of market-leading developer tools including WP Engine’s Local, the #1 Local WordPress development tool, Genesis, the #1 WordPress theme framework, and Atlas Content Modeler, which simplifies the development process of creating content models for headless WordPress sites.

The following plugins now join WP Engine’s existing toolset for the modern WordPress developer:

Advanced Custom Fields – makes it easy for developers to create full CMS solutions with WordPress including easy-to-edit fields for content creators on any kind of site.

WP Migrate (formerly WP Migrate DB Pro) – the perfect advanced developer workflow tool, trusted by global brands on some of the world’s largest WordPress sites. The software makes pushing/pulling the database, media, themes, and plugins between WordPress installs fast, easy and straightforward.

WP Offload Media – automatically copies media files to cloud storage e.g. Amazon S3, DigitalOcean Spaces or Google Cloud Storage, rewrites URLs and serves media from a storage provider or CDN; all of which greatly increases WordPress site speed and scale.

Better Search Replace – a lightweight, time-saving migration solution that runs a search/replace on the database when migrating a WordPress site to ensure everything works correctly.

WP Offload SES – effortlessly configures your WordPress site to send all emails via a cost-effective Amazon SES account, increasing inbox-deliverability and avoiding limits imposed by many email providers.

“ACF, WP Migrate and all of these plugins are tools the modern WordPress developer can’t live without,” said Heather Brunner, Chairwoman and CEO of WP Engine. “In combination with Local and our Genesis Framework, we continue to innovate and invest in our portfolio of essential builder tools so they’re not just used by developers to build WordPress sites today, but continue to be the preferred way of building for the next decade. We want to be the champion of the WordPress developer and make WP Engine their platform of choice for their most important digital experiences.”

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Ed Locher, Vice President of Marketing at HG Insights

Powering the Modern WordPress Developer

The acquisition, and in particular the addition of ACF, strengthens WP Engine’s platform, both its traditional managed WordPress and its headless offerings.

With the ability to add custom content fields throughout the classic WordPress interface as well as custom blocks to the new WordPress Block Editor, ACF will become even more important as block-based editing in WordPress continues to gain adoption. Specifically, ACF’s block-building functionality allows developers to build custom blocks far more quickly, and thus more easily create WordPress websites that are not only unique but tailored to the distinct needs of marketers and content creators.

On the headless front, along with the Atlas Content Modeler (ACM), WP Engine plans to innovate and invest in the continued development of ACF so that it remains the preferred tool for building and modeling content for headless WordPress sites. The combination of ACF and ACM will create the undisputed standard for content modeling for headless WordPress, further cementing WordPress’ position as a top choice for headless CMS architectures.

StudioPress, Genesis & The WordPress Community

In June 2018, WP Engine acquired StudioPress, creators of the Genesis Framework (“Genesis”), the world’s most popular theme framework and its accompanying suite of site building tools for amazing WordPress sites. In June 2019, WP Engine acquired Flywheel and with it Local, the #1 local development tool in WordPress. Since then, WP Engine has worked to improve the WordPress builder experience while Local downloads have grown to almost 900,000 and Genesis themes & plugins are used by nearly 600,000 websites.

With the acquisition of these developer tools from Delicious Brains, WP Engine is doubling down on its commitment to the WordPress community and to open source. These new tools, in combination with WP Engine’s existing builder tools, will provide both the best builder experience and also the fastest, easiest way to build and develop WordPress or headless WordPress websites. Further, WP Engine plans to expand support for contributors and the community by providing meaningful opportunities for continued collaboration and the ongoing maintenance and development of ACF, WP Migrate and these additional builder tools.