This week, we released the Pods Framework 2.7.21 Maintenance Update onto the WordPress.org Plugin Repository. This update includes the following fixes and updates:

• Support for traversing through serialized metadata in magic tags and Pods fields
• Support get_query_var() in pods_v()
• New WYSIWYG field option to customize editor height
• Clean up for the Pods::field() method
• Fixed encoding issues with certain relationship inputs
• Lots of bug fixes and small enhancements!

You can read the full change log for this release on the Development tab of the WordPress.org Repository

Friends of Pods Progress Report

We have made even more progress over the past couple of months since our call for support at the start of the year and our last progress update in March. Despite everything going on in the world, people still had room in their hearts and in their budgets to become a Friend of Pods. We are incredibly grateful that we’ve increased our recurring (monthly/yearly) friends count to the current 108/200 donors which is almost double the amount since our last update in March. As you can see by the projection chart below, if we continue the best-case trend, especially after we release Pods 2.8 we should hit our 200 donor goal by the end of 2020!

How does all of this bode for Pods itself? We now have enough in our monthly budget to keep maintenance releases flowing but that still means things like Pods 2.8 itself are taking longer than we had planned due to limited resources. We continue to do our best to offer as much support as we can in our Slack and WordPress.org plugin forums. We’re doing what we can and our community has been pitching in where they can which has continued to be helpful! Another big shout out to Jim True who is the backbone of our Community Support and has continually donated so much of his own time outside his full-time job commitments. By the way, if you aren’t already there — be sure to join us on Slack — Find out more about our Live Slack chat >>

We have some more add-ons in the works so keep an eye out as we get our first official batch of add-ons out to our friends in the coming month or so.

Pods 2.8 Status

Progress on Pods 2.8 itself has continued forward and we’re at about 90% of the way there. We will continue this month to get to a point where we can offer an Alpha or Beta release for curious people to check out. Stay tuned for more details as the month progresses — as always our Live Slack is the best place to get up-to-the-minute updates from our team as things happen. Our Friends of Pods even have their own channel where they get even more updates, among other chat perks.

We are enthusiastic about the features in Pods 2.8 so far, including the brand new Pods Blocks that will ship within Pods itself for free. This feature will let you build new blocks through code and get access to some of our starter blocks that operate how our shortcodes work but with better interfaces. We also have a new REST API powered by some of the underlying code from The Events Calendar by Modern Tribe that can manage configurations for Pods, Groups, and Fields. This REST API is also directly translated into an easy to use WP-CLI interface with minimal code so that our future REST API work will automatically become available as WP-CLI commands. There’s a ton of really cool stuff we’ve worked on for Pods 2.8 and we’re excited to get it in your hands.