This reduction comes after two rounds of employee buyouts late last year.

Stellar, the parent company of Kadence, Solid Security, Solid Backups, and other tools, is launching Stellar Sites. Stellar Sites hosting will include access to Kadence as well as the plugins under the Stellar brand. Early access will open later this month.

Toolset adds Open Street Map support and better support for newer versions of PHP.

Meta Box has added the ability to save your field groups in local JSON files. This may have a slight performance boost and makes it easier to version control. You can read about their implementation here.

Stackable Blocks has added a new global styles feature. It lets you easily set defaults for spacing and borders, color schemes, fonts, and buttons and icons.

Fluent Forms 6 was released last week. The free version includes an AI form builder. I tried this out and found that it was good for creating the fields you asked for, but doesn’t yet handle advanced steps like integrations. Fluent Forms free also now allows you to take 1 time and subscription payments via Stripe. There is a 1.9% fee per transaction on top of Stripe’s fee, which goes away in the pro version. I imagine they added the payment option as it will make it easier for people who want to monetize their FluentCommunity. Conditional Logic Groups is another feature in the free version, so instead of a single field being shown conditionally, you can have a group of fields. The pro version of Fluent Forms now has the option for a Save and Resume button on conversational forms, and Hungarian language support was also added.

One part of the announcement that I haven’t seen mentioned is that Fluent Forms passed third party security review and obtained Plugin Security Certification. I advocate that plugins and themes with more than a million active installs have 3rd party security reviews and it is good to see that Fluent Forms took this step, even before they reached that milestone.

Elementor has rebranded and relaunched an accessibility plugin. There is some community concern that a plugin only option is insufficient.

Laragon is a popular local development environment for Windows. It has long been free, but they have recently introduced a paid licensing model.

It looks like Elementor is getting on the CSS train for better design consistency. Also mentioned is that CSS Variables and components are on the roadmap.