CPTUI Celebrates 2 million downloads!

Hold on a sec, I need to dance.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, let’s move on.

In 2010, WebDevStudios released the first version of the Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) plugin to the WordPress plugin directory. At the time, Custom Post Types were brand new to WordPress and creating your own post types required (and still does, really) a complicated chunk of code. With CPTUI, the hard part was done for you. CPTUI quickly became popular with developers as a time-saving tool. So much so, that in July of 2015, 5 years after it’s initial release, the plugin passed the one million downloads mark.

I asked Brad Williams, our CEO and original developer of CPTUI if he had any idea the plugin would be so popular. He said,

Believe it or not, I absolutely knew CPTUI would be this popular. When Custom Post Types was introduced during the core development of WordPress 3.0, I immediately knew the impact it would have on the entire platform. I also knew, since the only way to register custom post types was via code, that most users would struggle with this so the idea of a UI for custom post types registration was born. We released the initial plugin before 3.0 was released and when the final version was announced, our plugin exploded overnight!

Growth, Change, and Reach

2016 has been an exciting year for CPTUI. In February, I was hired as Director of Products for WebDevStudios, and one of my first projects was helping to clean up the UI for CPTUI. We’ve focused on bringing it more in line with the standard WordPress dashboard aesthetic.

A couple months later, we released a paid add-on plugin called CPTUI Extended making it easy for non-developers to display their CPT data in pages and posts without writing a single line of code!

At the beginning of summer, the plugin hit another exciting milestone when the active install count jumped to 300,000. This is a gigantic number and places CPTUI easily in the top 100 plugins in the WordPress directory, which currently has 47,000+ plugins! All the while keeping a 4.6 average user rating.

This summer the plugin was also accepted into the GoDaddy WordPress Plugin Partner Program, and is consistently listed in the GoDaddy Hot 100 plugins list.

Wait. How many??

I said it before, 2016 has been pretty exciting. Today, specifically, even more so as we’re thrilled to announce that Custom Post Type UI has just passed the 2 million download mark!

It took 5+ years to reach the one million download mark and only 15 short months to double it. So, yeah, we’re pretty excited!

 

The success and growth of the plugin is largely due to WordPress itself becoming more popular and growing from a simple blog platform into a full-fledged content management system. CPT UI is ever evolving to stay current with everything that can be done with Custom Post Types. It’s exciting to think where the plugin will be by this time next year. You can follow along with the development (or submit a pull request) on Github, or download the current release from WordPress.org.