MachoThemes, Modula Parent Company, Acquires Three Gallery Plugins

MachoThemes, the WordPress development company behind the Modula Gallery plugin, has acquired three gallery plugins. The company is currently rolling the first two of the plugins, Final Tiles Grid Gallery Lite and PhotoBlocks Grid Gallery, into Modula. The third plugin, EverLightbox, will remain as a standalone project.

The three plugins were purchased from Diego Imbriani of GreenTreeLabs. This was not MachoThemes’ first acquisition from Imbriani. They acquired the original Modula plugin from him over two years ago. From there, they grew the user base and continued developing the plugin.

At this time, the exact details of the financial terms are not available to the public, but the transaction was in the range of low-to-mid 5-figures.

The acquisition is a part of MachoThemes’ growth strategy for building a larger audience for their Modula plugin, which currently has over 60,000 active installations. “We liked their feature set, their quirkiness, and overall what they stand for,” said MachoThemes owner Christian Raiber of the reasons behind the acquisition.

The merge of Final Tiles and PhotoBlocks affects over 34,000 plugin users. MachoThemes does not plan to continue supporting or developing them as individual plugins.

The team is in the process of building a migration script to allow users to bring their existing galleries over to the Modula plugin. It is important that users migrate to Modula or another option because unsupported versions of their current plugins may not work in the future.

Both plugins are similar to Modula by allowing users to create a gallery separately from the primary post content screen. However, the user interface and experience between all three plugins are nothing alike. Merging the plugins into Modula means that MachoThemes can work on a single interface and experience for users.

Users may be worried about losing features when migrating to a new plugin. “Most of these options already exist in Modula, under a different name, setting or otherwise paid extension,” said Raiber. “There are a few interesting options in these plugins indeed, and they’ve already sparked new ideas for the team to experiment with.”

Raiber said his company would reach out to users. “We’ll have videos, doc entries, and a dedicated page on wp-modula.com,” he said of the transition. The company plans to keep the plugins available for the next six months but may extend that period depending on how the transition for users is going.

The EverLightbox plugin will remain separate for those who want a lightbox feature for the standard WordPress galleries but not a full gallery-editing plugin. “We will continue to support the plugin and work hard to ensure that all users have a smooth-sailing experience with the plugin just as we have been for all of the plugins we’ve been building,” said Raiber.

The company plans to continue developing and supporting EverLightbox for the long term.