Today, I’m extremely excited to share that Envira Gallery, NextGen Gallery, Photocrati Theme, and Soliloquy Slider are joining Awesome Motive, and they’re now part of the WPBeginner family of products.
Envira Gallery and Soliloquy were part of Awesome Motive, and we sold the business at the end of 2017. I’m so excited to welcome them back home along with the NextGen Gallery and Photocrati theme.
Introduction – Quick Overview of the Plugins
Envira Gallery makes it easy to create beautiful photo and video galleries with its easy-to-use drag-and-drop gallery builder. It comes with several gallery themes and powerful addons that allow you to organize your pictures with albums and tags.
I use Envira Gallery on many of my websites.
It’s well optimized for web and server performance and ensures maximum speed.
NextGEN Gallery is another popular photo gallery plugin, with over 32 million downloads. It comes bundled with several gallery layouts, lightbox gallery view, and dozens of other Pro gallery extensions.
Its powerful built-in eCommerce system enables you to easily sell your photos, accept payments, and even ship printed photos directly to customers with its automatic WHCC print fulfillment.
Beautiful WordPress Photography Theme
Photocrati is the best WordPress theme built for photography websites.
Photocrati makes it easy to get your photography website up and running, thanks to tons of built-in demo themes and a 1-click demo installer.
With its built-in gallery management feature, you can manage unlimited galleries with ease.
Create Beautiful and Blazing Fast Sliders in Minutes
Soliloquy is one of the most popular WordPress slider plugins, with over 50,000 active installs. Since its inception, it has been helping site owners, small businesses, and even Fortune 500 companies create beautiful WordPress sliders in minutes.
Unlike most slider plugins, which could slow down your website, Soliloquy is built with performance in mind. In fact, we tested and compared the top 5 popular WordPress slider plugins, and Soliloquy turned out to be the fastest of them all.
Its user interface is sleek, and you’ll feel like it’s part of the native WordPress environment.
As part of the acquisition, the entire team behind all of these products is also joining Awesome Motive. The team will be led by Zach Kwarta, who will be serving as General Manager of Envira Gallery and Imagely business units.
I will be working closely with him, and I’m super excited about bringing you more powerful solutions to help grow your website.
Background Story
Now, those of you who have been following WPBeginner for a while probably remember that we actually created both Envira Gallery and Soliloquy.
Both of these plugins were part of Awesome Motive in the early days, and they were created by my co-founder in OptinMonster, Thomas Griffin.
We sold the plugins in 2017 to Nathan Singh because I wanted to focus on our business growth tools: OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights.
At that time, we simply did not have the right team infrastructure or operational playbook to manage a wide variety of plugins. I was still learning how to manage multiple fast-growing businesses, and I was truly afraid that Envira / Soliloquy would be overshadowed by our larger brands and get neglected.
I simply could not let that happen because that would mean that I would be letting you (our community) down. So, I made the hard decision to let someone lead Envira Gallery so it could continue getting the love and attention that it truly deserved.
Over the last 5 years, Nathan not only maintained Envira Gallery, he also consolidated the gallery plugin market by acquiring the most popular WordPress gallery plugin, NextGen Gallery, along with the Photocrati theme.
As he was looking to move on to the next chapter of his life, it only felt fitting that we bring Envira Gallery and Soliloquy back home to Awesome Motive along with Imagely.
In the same 5 year period, Awesome Motive grew a lot. We developed expertise and systems to manage multiple high quality WordPress plugins & SaaS software that are now used by over 25 million websites worldwide.
We went from being a software company that created growth tools to becoming a world renowned software company that builds tools to help small businesses grow and compete with the big guys.
What’s Coming Next?
Our work is just starting.
We will be leveraging the scale and knowledge of the Awesome Motive team to start innovating in the WordPress gallery space once again.
If you have suggestions on features you’d like to see in Envira Gallery, Imagely, or Soliloquy plugin, please let us know by sending us a message via WPBeginner contact form.
As always, I want to thank you for your continued support of WPBeginner.
Every time I share an announcement like this, I realize that I’m only able to do what I love every day because of you, our amazing readers, and I’m extremely grateful for your support throughout the years.
WPBeginner and Awesome Motive would not be here without YOU, and I just want to say how much I appreciate all of you.
And I look forward to continuing serving you and the larger WordPress / web ecosystem for years to come.
Yours Truly,
Syed BalkhiFounder of WPBeginner