Meta Box announced the release of the MB Toolset Migration plugin. This new plugin provides the ability to migrate custom fields created with Toolset over to work with Meta Box. It will be welcomed by users interested in moving old sites built with Toolset to Meta Box.
The MB Toolset Migration plugin is available for free from the WordPress plugin directory and is also included in the Meta Box All-In-One extension. The migration utility seems very full featured, including the ability to migrate:
- Custom fields, including all the field types such as gallery, relationship, group, repeater, and flexible content
- Field groups settings with their location rules
- Conditional logic
- All data for posts, terms, and users
- Post relationships
The release of the utility comes at a time when Toolset users have been commenting on the lack of updates and communication from the Toolset team. Toolset was one of the first vendors to release a deep integration with Gutenberg. However, as the Gutenberg experience has been refined, the experience working with Toolset Blocks has stood still and now seems clunky by contrast. Users have noted that even the release of tutorials and training materials has slowed down significantly.
Toolset is known for providing solutions for edge cases and for being developer friendly. Of the popular custom field providers Meta Box is also known for being developer friendly as it is modular with a rich programmer API and provides code friendly solutions such as Meta Box Views.
A year ago Meta Box released a similar migration utility for Advanced Custom Fields and I produced a walk-through article and video of the process. I also migrated a production site from ACF to Meta Box and the process was basically effortless. Migrating Toolset sites, however, might be more complex due to the types of use cases Toolset is know for. Beyond the backend functionality that is migrated with this new plugin, Toolset Views and Toolset Blocks provide output on the frontend of the site. Also, Toolset has some frontend faceted search functionality that is not available with Meta Box. This means that users moving more complex sites from Toolset to Meta Box will need to proceed cautiously and do thorough testing.
Over the past couple of years Meta Box has gained support from more page builders and plugins. Most notability the successful integration of Meta Box with the Oxygen Builder. No doubt the appearance of Meta Box on AppSumo last year also contributed to its growing popularity as it put the powerful Meta Box suite into the hands of more users. With the release of the MB Toolset Migration plugin the Meta Box team continues its steady growth and reach.
