The Dynamic WordPress Facebook group recently voted for the most innovative WordPress plugin or theme of 2024. This was an opportunity for group members to share their appreciation and recommendations about stand-out WordPress products. While the group is a small sampling of the wider WordPress community, it represents a broad cross-section of users. About two thirds of the members are agencies or freelancers while the other third are developers, product owners, or solopreneurs.
1st Place – Bricks Builder
Please join me in congratulations to the Bricks Builder team for being voted the Most Innovative Plugin or Theme of 2024 by the Dynamic WordPress community. “Innovative,” meaning Bricks Builder demonstrates creativity and ingenuity, but also has a practical use and is something people recommend. Bricks Builder is the project of Thomas Ehrig and team.
Earlier generations of page builders sought to hide the complexities of the underlying HTML and CSS, but Bricks, like some other modern builders, instead provides an interface for building sites with them. Bricks supports Advanced Custom Fields, Meta Box, JetEngine, Toolset, Pods, and ACPT along with other plugins that provide custom fields. Bricks has broader support for dynamic data than any other WordPress product. Bricks provides an easy to use Query Loop interface for creating custom database queries. Bricks supports advanced display conditions. All of these features and more make it an advanced and innovative product.
In addition to bug and security fixes, editor enhancements, and enhancements to existing features, in 2024 Bricks had 8 major feature releases. Some of the major new features included a Global Class Manager, CSS Variables Manager, Front-end Filters, and WooCommerce display conditions. Finally, the last release of 2024 was a beta release that introduced user created Reusable Components.
Like WordPress, Bricks was designed to be extendable. It should be noted that Advanced Themer, Automatic.css, and Bricksforge were also products in the final top 10 innovative products. Advanced Themer and Bricksforge are addons for Bricks. Automatic.css also has native integration with Bricks along with its support for other builders. The Bricks Builder is not only an innovative product in itself, but also fosters an ecosystem of creativity and innovation.
2nd Place – Greenshift
Greenshift is a solution suite for Gutenberg that includes a free block theme and core plugin. There is an advanced animation plugin, a query and dynamic data plugin, one for working with WooCommerce, for charts and for AI generation. Greenshift continually pushes the envelope for what is possible with Gutenberg and the Site Editor and has continually added new capabilities and innovations to their offering. Congratulations to Igor Sunz and team.
3rd Place – Breakdance Builder
Breakdance is a modern builder that targets Elementor and Divi users who want an easy to use builder that is powerful and performant. Breakdance has good support for dynamic data, works well with WooCommerce, includes Element Studio for creating your own builder elements, as well as a Client Mode for hand-off to end users. Breakdance is from Louis Reingold and team, who are congratulated for their third place showing.
