This week was jam-packed full of WordPress news.
Raising eyebrows in the WordPress community — especially among developers 🤨 — Delicious Brains announced they have acquired Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). Elliot Condon is the creator and has been the sole developer for ACF for about a decade. While Elliot will be involved in the transition, he will not stay with the Delicious Brains team in the long term, according to his blog post.
If you are a WordPress professional who depends on ACF then this is good news. The acquisition removes the “bus factor” — dependency on one (very good) developer — which is one, big, single point of failure. 💥🚌
This acquisition is different from Liquid Web‘s recent deals. Delicious Brains is not a hosting company — they make developer tools their primary business.
What will happen to ACF’s existing customers and pricing? Delicious Brains’ founder and CEO Brad Touesnard made it clear he’s “committed to honoring ACF lifetime licenses forever.”
Brad has a more detailed explanation in this tweet thread. 🐦
Get more insights from Cory and David about this and other acquisitions in the WordPress space. Go listen to their latest Post Status Excerpt podcast. They share their thoughts after listening to a discussion between Brad and Elliot. 🎙️
Liquid Web acquires again 💧
The acquisition news didn’t stop with Delicious Brains. On the same day ACF and Delicious Brains announced their deal, Iconic also announced its acquisition by Liquid Web. The hosting company is bringing Iconic into StellarWP, Liquid Web’s new software brand for plugins geared toward commerce and non-profit organizations. 🌠
Iconic has been around for about nine years. In that time it has developed an impressive portfolio of WooCommerce plugins. According to inside sources the “entire team will stick around.”
Competition in the eCommerce space is driving acquisitions and new services.
It’s not a shock that Liquid Web has brought another eCommerce company under its fold. It’s also not a surprise that other hosting and service companies are making strides in the eCommerce space as well. It is still red hot, thanks to the pandemic. ♨️
WP Engine recently announced a new eCommerce solution for small to mid-sized businesses. It is for people who “seek to launch a new WooCommerce store or scale up, optimize, and increase revenue for an existing online store.”
This new solution offers integration with another service that provides Elasticsearch to WordPress and WooCommerce. 🔍
