The 1950s New York Yankees are prime examples, as are the 1990s Chicago Bulls. But now, as this year’s Plugin Madness draws to a close, the winning plugin Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) joins the ranks of all-time championship dynasties, securing its third Plugin Madness trophy since the event’s inception in 2016.

This year’s victory also marks back-to-back championships for ACF, the world’s most widely used custom fields plugin, which edged out WooCommerce in a nail-biting, buzzer-beating finish.

Before the final round, ACF also outmaneuvered other formidable competitors, including Table Press, Wordfence, and previous Plugin Madness champion Smush, underscoring ACF’s enduring relevance and widespread popularity within the WordPress community.

What is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)?

ACF is the most widely used custom fields plugin that transforms WordPress sites into fully-fledged content management systems, providing comprehensive tools to manipulate data more effectively.

Using the plugin, you gain total control over your WordPress edit screens and custom field data. The plugin allows you to add customized fields to any page, enhancing site functionality with elements like customer reviews or detailed product descriptions. It’s also user-friendly, and its intuitive interface ensures both novices and seasoned developers can maximize its capabilities.

With over 5 million active installations, ACF has long been a cornerstone of the WordPress plugin ecosystem. The team behind ACF consistently drives innovation with new features and improvements that empower developers to build highly functional websites effortlessly.  

Now, with its third Plugin Madness championship in tow, the plugin has further cemented itself as a pillar within the WordPress community, with more innovation and inspiration to come.     

Previous Plugin Madness Winners 

Now in its ninth year, Plugin Madness has seen a wide variety of notable winners. 

While ACF won its second championship last year, The Plus Addons for Elementor took the crown as a first-time competitor in 2022. In 2021, FluentCRM made headlines with a Cinderella story of its own. 

Elementor claimed victories in 2020 and 2019, while Smush had a similar back-to-back run in 2018 and 2017.

A big thank you goes out to everyone who nominated a plugin and participated in the weekly voting. 

Plugin Madness is an excellent platform for highlighting outstanding plugins and the teams and individuals behind them.

Congratulations once again to ACF on clinching this year’s Plugin Madness championship!

The post Advanced Custom Fields is Your 2024 Plugin Madness Champion!  appeared first on Torque.

While the last few weeks were all about nominating the best WordPress plugins, it’s now time to shift focus as the competition truly begins. Voting for Plugin Madness 2024 is now open, kicking off a seven-week gauntlet of head-to-head plugin matchups.

You can cast your votes below or visit the Plugin Madness page here.

Every Vote Counts 

With the field of 64 plugins set, the question remains, who will dominate the court, and who will stumble?

Your votes are crucial, week by week, to determine the answer, carrying forward your preferred contenders through each round. Make sure and mark your calendars for the following voting schedule.  

– Week 1 (64): March 4

– Week 2 (32): March 11

– Week 3 (16): March 18

– Week 4 (8): March 25

– Week 5 (4): April 1

– Week 6 (2): April 8

– Week 7 (Winner announced): April 15

Get ready for the thrill of last-second victories and ensure you’re part of the action every step of the way. Ready to get in the game? Vote using the bracket above and make sure you come back to Torquemag.io each week to cast your votes in the following rounds.

What is Plugin Madness?

Plugin Madness is a bracket-style competition in which 64 WordPress plugins compete against one another through weekly voting rounds. 

This year marks the ninth annual Plugin Madness, and your votes are key to the game.

While some brackets are split by regions, the Plugin Madness bracket is divided into four categories: Marketing, Optimization, Maintenance, and eCommerce.This ensures a diverse and exciting competition, showcasing the wide versatility of WordPress plugins.

Get in on the Madness

Make sure and come back each week to vote, helping your favorite plugins advance through each round. Will your top pick make a buzzer-beater or be benched before the finals? Only your votes will decide!

This year’s Plugin Madness is set to be bigger and better than ever. Whether you’re new to WordPress or a seasoned pro, your input is crucial in making this event a slam-dunk success. 

Make sure and cast your votes, and may the best plugin win!
For more information click here.

The post Voting is Now Open for Plugin Madness 2024! appeared first on Torque.

Plugin Madness is a bracket-style competition in which 64 WordPress plugins compete against one another through weekly voting rounds—and the 2024 competition has officially kicked off. Nominations for Plugin Madness 2024 are now open! 

Nominations for Plugin Madness 2024 are now closed. Check back on March 4 when voting begins!

This year marks the ninth annual Plugin Madness, and your nominations are key to tipping off the game.

Seeking the Best Plugins

Think of yourself as a scout, seeking out the most valuable players in the plugin arena. Plugin Madness is all about identifying plugins that not only solve problems but also enhance the WordPress experience. 

Whether it’s a plugin that’s been a game-changer for your website or one that’s just too good to ignore, we want to hear all about it. Simply fill out the form here to submit your plugin of choice. 

Remember, to qualify for the competition, plugins must be: 

• Listed in the WordPress Plugin Repository 
• Be updated within the last 12 months 
• Be compatible with WordPress 6.2+

Plugin Categories

Some brackets are split by regions; the Plugin Madness bracket will be categorized into four key areas: Marketing, Optimization, Maintenance, and eCommerce. 

This classification ensures a diverse and exciting competition, showcasing the wide versatility of WordPress plugins.

The Game Plan: Important Dates

Make sure and mark your calendars! Plugin Madness nominations run through February 26th. After that, the real fun begins with the voting phase starting on March 4. The competition heats up with each passing week as the bracket dwindles from 64 to 32 and, ultimately, this year’s Plugin Madness champion!

 Here’s the breakdown:

• Week 1 (64): March 4
• Week 2 (32): March 11
• Week 3 (16): March 18
• Week 4 (8): March 25
• Week 5 (4): April 1
• Week 6 (2): April 18
• Week 7 (Winner announced): April 15

Join the Madness: Be Part of the Action

Your role in the madness doesn’t end with nominations. Make sure and come back each week to vote, helping your favorite plugins advance through each round. 

Will your top pick make a buzzer-beater or be benched before the finals? Only your votes will decide!

Don’t Miss This Year’s Slam Dunk Event

This year’s Plugin Madness is set to be bigger and better than ever. Whether you’re new to WordPress or a seasoned pro, your input is crucial for making this event a slam-dunk success. 

Make sure to submit your nomination, don’t forget to vote, and may the best plugin win!

For more information on Plugin Madness, click here.

The post Nominations Now Open For Plugin Madness 2024! appeared first on Torque.

Plugins will be divided into four categories:

• Marketing
• Maintenance
• Optimization
• eCommerce.

We’ll take each of your top nominations and put them through a bracket-style competition throughout March until we’ve landed on the ultimate plugin!

Voting in March is important, but if your favorite plugins don’t get nominated, then you might not even have the chance. So nominate your favorite plugins today!

The post Nominate Your Favorite Plugins for Plugin Madness 2020 appeared first on Torque.

It is the final week of Torque’s Plugin Madness 2019 and we are down to our two finalists. Be sure to vote today for your favorite on PluginMadness.com.

We also have a great new update from WordCamp Europe and news about WP Campus 2019.

Love WordPress news but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

This is it, the final week of our Plugin Madness competition. We started with 64 great WordPress plugins and thanks to your help we’ve narrowed it down to just two finalists: Advanced Custom Fields and Elementor Page Builder.

Elementor is a page builder plugin with drag and drop capabilities and an emphasis on responsive design. It replaces the basic WordPress editor with a live frontend editor, so you don’t have to switch back and forth between the editor and preview mode. You can create the layouts visually and see how it looks right away. It also has over 2 million active installs and a near perfect rating with nearly 3,000 five star reviews in the plugin repository.

Advanced Custom Fields is a plugin which allows you to add extra content fields to your WordPress site. These custom fields help you build websites faster and are easy for your clients to use. You’ve probably heard us rave about Advanced Custom Fields in the show before and you may recall that they were the winners of our first ever Plugin Madness competition in 2016.

Now we know that these are two great plugins and were sorry to make you have to choose, but that’s how these things work. To make sure your favorite plugin wins this covetted trophy, be sure to go to PluginMadness.com to cast your vote today.

WordCamp Europe is coming up in June, so let’s check in with the organizers to see what’s in store for this year’s event:

Thanks for that update. Can’t wait to see y’all in Berlin this year.

Speaking of WordCamps, WPCampus a 3day conference that focuses on accessibility and WordPress in higher education. The organizers of this year’s event have announced that it will be happening July 25-27, 2019 in Portland, Oregon. I’m hoping that either Emily or I will be able to make it this year because it sounds like a rad event.

That’s it for this week, thanks to our friends at WCEU for sharing another great update and thanks for all of the folks who have voted in this year’s Plugin Madness. We’ll see you next week to announce our final winner of Plugin Madness 2019.

The post Doc Pop’s News Drop: The Plugin Madness 2019 Finalists appeared first on Torque.

In this week’s News Drop we talk about a recent Jetpack update which adds feature suggestions to activate a Jetpack feature to the top of search results on the plugin repository. Doc talks about why they did it and what it means for the future of ads in the WordPress dashboard. Since this video was recorded, a newer version of Jetpack has been released to make these suggestions easier to identify as modified results, but they still appear in search results.

We also hear a WordCamp Europe update from Milan Ivanovic and talk about the semi-final round of the Plugin Madness competition.

Love WordPress News, but hate reading my name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

It is week 4 of our Plugin Madness competition! It’s the semi-final round and we are down to just two matchups between 4 WordPress plugins.

In one matchup we have The Events Calendar,  a popular plugin for showing upcoming events, paired up against Advanced Custom Fields, who were the winner of the first ever Plugin Madness competition a few years back.

The other matchup is between Elementor Page Builder and Smush Image Compression, which is a two time Plugin Madness winner and a great plugin for reducing image file sizes.

This semi final round is just getting started, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see two previous winners pitted up against each other in the final round. Be sure to vote for your favorite developers over on pluginmadness.com

Jetpack 7.1 was released in March and is full of new features… unfortunately the one most people are talking about is a feature that changes results when searching for new plugins in the in the plugin respository.

When you search for something like “optimization” or “preformance” in the repository, you might expect to see an unbaised set of plugins in the results, but if you have the current version of Jetpack installed, you’ll see a new result up at the top of your search results that suggests using Jetpack for your solution since you already have it installed. The suggestion looks like an organic search result and is followed by the usual search results for your keyword.
From Jetpack’s point of view, if a user is searching for something they already provide, that user should probably just activate the feature in Jetpack rather than install a new plugin. Given Jetpack’s reputation for being a bloated plugin already, it’s probably even a good idea for users not to add redundant features.

The problem for many folks is that this search results are not clearly labelled as something changed by Jetpack. It does show up slightly different than a usual search result, but most new users might not realize that they are seeing something that has been altered.

Some users are even more worried that this could lead a dangerous new precedent for plugin developers to promote their tools in the WP-dashboard, which should be a sacred space, right? Already we are seeing tons of pop-up notifications at the top of our dashboards, that are starting to feel more and more spammy as the trend becomes more normalized. If you have a plugin installed now, you might see nags to leave a 5 star review or upgrade to premium show up on the top of your dashboard notifications, but as these developers get bolder its scary to imagine them altering search results.

Some users are saying this new feature breaks WordPress’s plugin guideline rules. The plugin’s developer says that since the results aren’t an ad, they are not breaking any rules, but that answer didn’t sit well with some users. Shortly after the conversation got started, the plugin repository rules were modified to “Simplify the explanations regarding advertising”, but it appears these changes were added specifically to permit these new Jetpack changes.
Where the old rules said “Advertising within the WordPress dashboard should be avoided.” the updated rules now state “Advertising within the WordPress dashboard is permitted within reason.”

So wether or not you have Jetpack installed, you can probably expect to see your favorite plugins add more ads to your dashboard because why wouldn’t they?

Okay, thats enough talk about plugins, let’s check in with Milan to hear the newest happenings over at WordCamp Europe.

Thanks so much that Milan. We cant wait to hear more in next week’s episode. Thanks for watching and let us know your thoughts on the WordPress’s new rules regarding in-dashboard advertising in the comments below.

The post Doc Pop’s News Drop: Should Plugins Alter Search Results? appeared first on Torque.

In this week’s episode we talk about Think Like A Hacker, the new podcast from Wordfence.com and the newest results from our Plugin Madness competition. We also a feature a new video that the WordCamp Europe team shared with us about this year’s event in Berlin.

Love WordPress news but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

This week we have a big update from the global lead for WordCamp Europe and we’ll also share updates about our Plugin Madness competition, but first…

We are huge fans of the folks over at WordFence, who continously pump out great research and articles about WordPress security on their blog. They’ve recently launched a brand new podcast and video series called Think Like a Hacker.

This week’s episode of the show features a fascinating story about a vulnerability in the Social Warfare plugin and an activist who used this exploit to wage a war on the moderators of the WordPress support forums. This individual claims that when exploits are discovered, they should immediately be published on the support forums, and until that happens, they will be publically sharing those vulnerabilities on their own site along with examples on how to take advantage of them… starting with a vulnerability found in the Social Warfare plugin. It’s a fascinating story and one you can learn more about on WordFence.com/blog or by searching for Think Like a Hacker on your favorite podcasting service.

Mine is Overcast.

We kicked off our Plugin Madness competition with 64 WordPress plugins and we are down to just 16! One of this week’s closest matchups is Defender versus Advanced Custom Fields which is nearly a 50/50 contest at this moment. Defender is a WordPress security plugin by WPMU Dev that allows you to add a layer of denfense to your site. It’s against Advanced Custom Fields, which was the winner of the first ever Plugin Madness competition back in 2016. In fact, if you were one of the many readers who helped nominate WordPress plugins for this event, then you saw ACF in action.

Another match to watch is Smush Image Compression, a great tool for easily reducing image file sizes, vs Ninja Forms, another popular form creation plugin with over a million active installs.

WordCamp Europe is coming up in just a few months. The location of WCEU hops around each year and we are looking forward to this year’s event in Berlin. In preperation, the organizers of WCEU have offered to share updates with us each week before WCEU 2019!

Thanks for that update Milan, and thanks to all of y’all for watching. We’ll see you next week for more WordPress news and Plugin Madness.

The post Doc Pop’s News Drop: WCEU 2019 and Plugin Madness appeared first on Torque.

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The World Wide Web just turned 30 and #WordPress powers over 33% of it. Learn more in this week’s News Drop.

Love WordPress news but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop.

Today is the World Wide Web’s 30th Birthday. Happy birthday, internet! I hear 30 is the new 20!

On this day in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea of using a collection of web pages and the http protocol to access the Internet from any part of the world.

And speaking of websites, W3Techs newest study shows that WordPress powers 33.3% of all the websites on the Internet. That’s up from 25% from just a few years ago and the number is still growing. I’m not just talking about CMS’s either, W3Techs says that 1 in 3 of all websites is powered by WordPress.

Another big event happened this week, we’ve just launched Plugin Madness, our bracket style competition to find out which WordPress plugin is the best WordPress plugin… according to our readers. We are kicking the tournament off with 64 plugins that were all submitted by people like you and put into 4 main categories: ecommerce, maintenance, marketing, and optimization. Each week we’ll cut the list in half, so be sure to go to PluginMadness.com each week to vote for your favorite WordPress plugins.
Things are just getting started, but we’ve already received 4,000 votes in the first 24 hours!
One of the closest matches so far is between BigCommerce for WordPress and CoursePress Learning Management System.

CoursePress allows website owners to sell tutorials, online video courses, quizzes, and completion certificates.

BigCommerce is an ecommerce website builder that helps you create your own online store, rather than just adding a store to part of your site as an add on.

There are many more matches up, so be sure to go to pluginmadness.com to vote for your favorites today.

The post Doc Pop’s News Drop: WordPress Powers 33% of the Web! appeared first on Torque.

Plugins will be divided into four categories:

• Marketing
• Maintenance
• Optimization
• eCommerce.

We’ll take each of your top nominations and put them through a bracket-style competition throughout March until we’ve landed on the ultimate plugin!

Voting in March is important, but if your favorite plugins don’t get nominated, then you might not even have the chance. So nominate your favorite plugins today!

The post Nominate Your Favorite Plugins for Plugin Madness 2019 appeared first on Torque.