Back in 2010 I started doing some more serious web development work using WordPress. For this I needed a way to add more text boxes, text areas and images to posts and pages.
The plugins I found back then that made this possible was More Fields and Custom Fields Template . They worked ok, but they did miss some things that I needed, like the possibility to add many fields of the same type (i.e. make them “repeatable”) and the option to have groups of fields that I could reuse in different combinations.
So I started to develop my own fields plugin and in March 2010 Simple Fields was introduced the world.
Simple Fields worked great. I can not imagine how I could have created any of the sites that I created then without using Simple Fields.
Now it’s been six years. And during these years a lot of new and interesting plugins for fields management have seen the light of day. Many of them are great. Many of them are developed by very skilled developers. May of them are even developed by teams.
Not actively developed anymore
So it’s time for me to make it official: I will not develop Simple Fields actively any longer. To be honest it has not been very active for quite a while now. But now it’s official anyway.
…but there are alternatives!
As I said there are now many good alternatives to Simple Fields. I have kept an eye on some of the plugins. Some look very interesting and I’ve used some myself.
These three I have used myself with good result. If you’re looking for an alternative to Simple Fields then you should start by checking them out:
The following plugins I have not used myself, but they do look very promising:
Take over the plugin – or buy it!
Simple Fiels does have over 10.000 active installs. And all of the reviews are either 5 stars or 4 stars. And there has been people emailing me over the years, asking if they could buy the plugin.
So… if you’re interested in taking over the project in an way, drop me an email at par.thernstrom@gmail.com or tweet me at @eskapism.
Hi, I just wanted to ask you if there are updates if someone is taking over the plugin. Because I have some Websites which use the plugin very extensively and I would be happy to know if it’s still working in 2017 – otherwise I need to start migrating which is a lot of work. Thx anyway for all the years.
Hi! So far there has been no interest from anyone to continue the development of the plugin. The source code is however available at GitHub, so anyone can submit fixes or fork it and so on. I actually believe there is a fork with some activity… Please check the github page here: https://github.com/bonny/WordPress-Simple-Fields.
Pär – have used the plugin for years and have made it do some pretty fun things. Thanks for all your work over the years on it.
Thanks for the kind words Marco. I have also read about plugins that have been taken over by people with bad agendas. I can assure you that I do not want something like that to happen to any of my plugins.
Hi Pär, thanks for having been developing this useful plugin.
I’ve used it as a choice on some sites and always been happy with it. I’m sad about your decision not to continue active developement but I can understand.
I just wanted to suggest that, in case that someone is taking over the project or even buy it, you make a public notice about that. Last month many people like me that have a very popular plugin installed got their sites infected by malicous code after a regular update published on WP repository by the new developer instead of the original one. (please see https://blog.sucuri.net/2016/03/when-wordpress-plugin-goes-bad.html ).
With over 10.000 active installs it can be easy go to the Dark Side 🙂