Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.
Congrats to Smush Image Compression for winning Torque’s 2018 Plugin Madness competition! Thanks to everyone who nominated and voted this year, it was a huge success.
You can read more about the results here.
You can also learn more about WordCamp Europe here.
Love WordPress news but hate reading? My name is Doc and this is Doc Pop’s News Drop!
We’ll talk about how events like WordCamp Europe can afford to keep tickets affordable, but first let’s talk about Plugin Madness!
This was the 3rd year of our Plugin Madness tournament, where users nominated their 64 favorite WordPress plugins and we set them up in a bracket style competition.
We started with 64 plugins which we split up into 4 main brackets: ecommerce, marketing, maintenance, and optimization.
Ecommerce started off with some heavy hitters like WooCommerce and the Event Tickets plugin, but this year’s hot new eCommerce plugin was Restrict Content: a simple membership plugin that enables you to put your content behind a wall so only logged-in users can access it.
Over in Marketing we had some more familiar faces like Popups by Optin Monster, a popular plugin that allows you to increase newsletter sign ups with a simple pop up feature, but the winner for this division was the Custom Sidebars plugin.
Maintenance was a really heated division with many popular plugins like WordFence and Updraft Plus going head to head, but the final winner of this round was Duplicate Post, a plugin that allows you to copy older posts and… well… duplicate them. I use this all the time.
And over in the Optimization bracket, we started off with plugins like Advanced Custom Fields, Contact Form 7, and Yoast SEO, but we managed to shrink them down to just one winner: Smush Image Compression, a plugin that allows you to reduce image file sizes for faster page loading.
So after 4 weeks, we had Smush vs Custom Sidebars and Restrict Content vs Duplicate Post.
Then it was Restrict Content vs Smush in the semi-final round and finally…
Smush Image Compression was the winner! Congrats to Smush on winning Torque’s Plugin Madness competition for two years in a row!
Thanks to everyone who nominated plugins and voted and a big thanks to all of the great developers who help create these amazing plugins.
Now, let’s check in with Jenny Beaumont, the lead organizer of WordCamp Europe:
Thanks Jenny! We really enjoy these weekly updates.
Thats it for this week’s news drop, thanks for liking and subscribing to our channel, we’ll see you next week for more WordPress news.
Doc Pop
Doctor Popular is an artist and musician living in San Francisco. As a full disclaimer, he is neither a doctor nor popular.
The post Doc Pop’s News Drop: Plugin Madness 2018 Recap appeared first on Torque.
