Delicious Brains 2022 Year in Review: High-Speed Towards the Future

It’s been an exciting year for the teams behind the Delicious Brains plugins. Major new releases have brought some long-awaited features to our users, and we have exciting plans for more releases throughout 2023. In addition, the Delicious Brains plugins were acquired by WP Engine in June 2022. This has given our development teams much greater access to development and testing resources, increasing the speed with which we can continue to improve the plugins.

WP Migrate Merges Addons, Introduces High-Speed File Transfers

It’s been a busy year for the WP Migrate team, with three major and seven minor releases over the course of 2022.

We kicked the year off with the release of 2.2.2 on January 11 to handle some bug fixes, before releasing WP Migrate 2.3 on March 31. This was a significant release, introducing long-requested features like the ability to push and pull files without the database, and an easier way to compare theme and plugin versions between two sites.

The 2.3 release also included an official name change for the plugin: from WP Migrate DB and WP Migrate DB Pro to WP Migrate Lite and WP Migrate.

In addition, functionality previously restricted to addons was moved into the core plugin in order to reduce the amount of setup required for each new site.

April saw the release of 2.3.1, with 2.3.2 following on May 19. In August, we released 2.3.4, which included a number of improvements such as full compatibility for pushing media, themes, and plugins to sites hosted by WP Engine.

WP Migrate’s first major release as part of WP Engine came on September 22 with the release of version 2.4. This release introduced two new panels for migrating must-use plugins and other files in the wp-content directory, making it possible to migrate an entire site from WP Admin.

In WP Migrate 2.4, a new Must-Use Plugins panel now appears in Push and Pull migration profiles whenever mu-plugins are detected.

The Other Files panel now appears in Push and Pull migration profiles whenever miscellaneous files are detected in the `wp-content` directory.

The release of WP Migrate 2.4 was supported by two bug fix releases in October before the release of 2.5 on November 22. WP Migrate 2.5 brought High-Performance File Transfers out of beta testing, greatly increasing migration speed for big sites with lots of files. Check out the results of our benchmarking efforts for a closer look into our testing process.

The WP Migrate team has some exciting stuff planned for 2.6, including the addition of full-site exports with the ability to drag and drop the archive directly into Local.

WP Offload Media Paves the Way for Future Integrations

The WP Offload Media team brought out three major releases in 2022, along with a host of bug fixes and new features, including improved compatibility with PHP 8.1, the introduction of new selectable regions for Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Digital Ocean, and updates to Amazon and Google SDKs.

WP Offload Media 2.6 was the plugin’s first major release in 2022, and introduced two major advances: a new BuddyBoss integration and an improvement to how media is offloaded, including files outside of the WordPress Media Library. The new BuddyBoss integration required us, for the first time, to offload files that exist entirely outside of the Media Library. The work done for this will lead to streamlined development of future integrations that also require offloading items from outside the Media Library.

BuddyBoss

2.6.1 and 2.6.2 followed with bug fixes in March and April. The release schedule went quiet for a few months after that, but the quiet period ended with a bang with the release of WP Offload Media 3.0 on September 29. This was the first major release since the plugin was acquired by WP Engine in June 2022.

WP Offload Media 3.0 introduced a brand new user interface, powerful filters and columns in the Media Library, and revamped bulk management tools. It was supported by bug fix releases on September 30 (3.0.1) and October 5 (3.0.2). Bulk management tools have always been a key differentiating factor for WP Offload Media, and they only got better in version 3.0 with the new Tools tab.

Finally, the team brought out WP Offload Media 3.1 on December 7. This release included improvements to storage provider listings, new selectable regions for major providers, and SDK Updates.

The WP Offload Media team is hard at work on the next release. Among other improvements, 3.2 will include a new offloaded status indicator that provides quick insight into your currently offloaded media items as well as any items that may still need to be offloaded..

Thank You!

It’s been a big year for releases, but the most exciting part is still to come. We’ve put in a lot of work in 2022 that will bear fruit throughout 2023. I can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store for all the Delicious Brains plugins. Keep an eye on Twitter for the latest updates throughout the year.

Advanced Custom Fields—acquired by WP Engine along with the rest of the Delicious Brains plugins—has also advanced in the last year, as documented in Iain’s year in review post.

What would you like to see from us in 2023? Let us know in the comments!

About the Author

Kevin Hoffman Product Manager

Kevin Hoffman is a Sr. Product Manager at WP Engine where he is building WordPress plugins such as WP Migrate and WP Offload Media. With a background in user interface design and web development, he transitioned into product management at GiveWP and Delicious Brains before joining WP Engine in 2022. Kevin works remotely from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he lives with is wife and son.