6+ years and 2.7k+ commits went into the incredibly vast features of the Pods 2.8 release that is now free for everyone to enjoy.

Big ticket features

• Field Groups – You can now separate Fields into their own Groups on any Pod 🎉
• Better Performance – Pods now loads more quickly, uses less memory, and auto-loaded options have been reduced up to 95%!
• New Pod Editor – The new Edit Pod screen has been completely rewritten in React and uses our new REST API saving separately for the Pod, Groups, and Fields.
• New Field Types – We added two new layout-related field types — Heading and HTML.
• New Pods Blocks – We are excited to introduce our new Pods Blocks which allow you to List Items, show a Single Item, display a Single Item Field, show a Public Form, or embed a View (any file) from your theme / child theme. We also included compatibility with the WordPress 5.8 Query Loop blocks!
• New Pods Blocks API – For those creators out there looking to get ahead with some common custom block needs, our new Pods Blocks API allows you to register your own blocks.
• New REST API – Our new REST API endpoints (11 endpoints total) allow for managing Pod configurations.
• New WP-CLI commands – Our new WP-CLI commands (24 commands total) allow for managing Pod configurations.
• New Editor option for WYSIWYG fields – The Quill Editor is now officially supported for WYSIWYG fields.
• Now implementing a new core library – Pods 2.8 now uses the same core library that the fantastic plugins The Events Calendar and Event Tickets use. This gives us access to some great abstractions that we don’t have to build or maintain ourselves as part of Pods. We’ll be tapping into more of that magic as time goes on too.
• Stability Improvements – We introduced 304 new automated tests with 11,131 new assertions to make sure new features and code structures are operating at their best.

Breaking compatibility

• New minimum required versions have been updated as follows which includes notices to let you know if you need to update something.
  • New minimum version required: WordPress 5.5+ (previously: WP 4.5+)
  • New minimum version required: PHP 5.6+ (previously: PHP 5.3+) — Hey! You should take the time to update to PHP 7.4+ because there’s major speed improvements to be had 🙂
  • New minimum version required: MySQL 5.5+ (previously: MySQL 5.1+)
• Refactored object handling for Pod and Field configurations — we now lazy load and pull things as-needed from the database instead of always pulling all Pods and Fields at once. It remains backward compatible in most array usage — see the Field Guide for more details.
• Public forms now render with the “div” output type (previously “ul”).
• CLEditor is no longer maintained and has been replaced with the React-based Quill.

For a more comprehensive and complete list of features, enhancements, and backwards compatibility changes — Read the Complete Pods 2.8 Field Guide.

Check out these new Pods 2.8 related documentation pages

What’s coming in Pods 2.9

• Simple Repeatable Fields – Make fields repeatable so that you can enter multiple sets of text, websites, phone numbers, emails, passwords, content, code, dates, numbers, currency, oEmbeds, or colors.
• JSON/YML based configurations – Create your file-based configurations for Pods, Groups, and Fields which means you can commit them to version control (Git/SVN) based on your workflow needs.

In the interest of transparency, the complete development costs for Pods 2.9 will be $6000 and all donations (monthly, annual, or one-time) will contribute towards the fundraising goal. As soon as we meet our goal, we can be in beta within days and release Pods 2.9 within a month after that.

UPDATE – November 19th, 2021 – We met our fundraising goal of $6000 thanks to the great people behind Gravity Forms. We are working hard on getting the features in Pods 2.9 completed and will post more updates on our Twitter / Slack when we have an update on progress.