Hello from Ned – Toolset’s New Lead Developer

   Ned Andonov

Announcements

April 29, 2025
12

From the start, Toolset has been here to help you build powerful WordPress sites. It’s a product our team takes pride in. As I step into the role of team leader, I’m committed to keeping that mission going strong.

I’m Ned Andonov, and I’m excited to introduce myself as the new Lead Developer for Toolset. It’s an honor to take on this responsibility, and I’d like to share a bit about the journey that brought me here.

For me, Toolset isn’t just a product. It’s a community of developers, site owners, and creators who are passionate about building exceptional WordPress websites.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the opportunity to work closely with the team. I’ve learned from the people who built Toolset. I’ve also had the chance to dive into the development work that makes this product what it is.

I want to take a moment to share a few words from the previous leadership, because they really capture how we got here:

Juan Antonio de Paco Moreno, Previous Toolset Team Lead

❝I have always considered Toolset as my own project, my own legacy. So when we decided to bring new strength to lead the project, I wanted to make sure that we could find the right people. It was a long quest — not everyone has the right mindset and skills.

The outcome of that research was finding Ned. Ned promised high quality, superb attention to details, commitment, and dedication.

Ned has been delivering to those expectations. He is structured and curious. And he is bringing a better way of looking at the work on Toolset waiting ahead. I never thought that I could pass the baton to someone else with this sense of confidence and trust. With Ned, Toolset is in good hands and we can expect great things from him.❞

These words mean a lot to me, and they remind me of the high standards set for Toolset. 

As I take on this role, my focus is on supporting you, the people who use Toolset every day. The goal is simple – listen to your needs and make sure Toolset works the way you need it to.

Thank you for being part of the Toolset community. I’m looking forward to working with you as we continue to improve and build great sites together.

 

Comments 12 Responses

  1. Sounds nice! All the best for your start. I really hope you continue to develop Toolset, especially in direction to Full Site Editing (improve Toolset’s compatibility with FSE themes.)

    Reply

  2. Good luck Ned,
    I may have another look at Toolset, I love its concept but have found the instructions bitty with different sections which have made it for me too difficult for me to follow, and I would like to!
    Regards

    John Hardy

    Reply

  3. Hi Ned,

    it is a pleasure that you step in and this sounds as Toolset might get revived again? In my understanding, Toolset stop to get developed further on a few years again. At least, it was updated to newer WordPress and PHP versions and I hope you also made sure that security issues that came up were secured.

    I also have in mind that at that time a message fromm Toolset told that with Gutenberg editor and other page builders like Elementor you do not see that Toolset will have a future.

    So, I am keen to learn what’s on the agenda …

    Kind regards, Martin

    Reply

  4. Hi Ned
    Very pleased to have you on board!

    I guess like a lot of Toolset users I have been wondering what the future holds for this great web building platform. Hopefully you will be able to tell us a little of the future development plans.

    Unlike some others, I don’t see the introduction of WordPress Gutenberg and Blocks as a serious competitor to what Toolset offers.

    For me the strength of Toolset is (was) to be able to build a complex website without the need to go anywhere near the very poor Gutenberg user interface. I was sad to see the tools I use now described as legacy features. I did a bit of browsing through the website developers forums and found plenty of professional WordPress based developers who don’t use either the Gutenberg interface or blocks in their website development work and have no intention to do so unless they are forced to.

    There are lots of features which I use in my websites which Toolset provides and quite a few which Toolset doesn’t, where I need to make use of other plugins. However the key Toolset asset of very flexible custom post type management is core to how I design websites.

    So my voice is to encourage your to develop Toolset as a tool which can be used completely independently of Gutenberg as much as is possible, and concentrate on adding features currently missing from the tool set.

    I understand you need to manage input from current Toolset users but I hope you do provide a more formal forum for users to input suggestions.

    Best wishes for the future

    Reply

  5. Great to have you on board!

    But the truth is I have stripped Toolset from my sites and replaced with ACF because (a) future uncertainty made it unviable, and (b) wider compatibility with ACF was hard to ignore.

    However, there are definitley things about Toolset I miss, and the biggest is an ability to template CPTs even without FSE or Elementor. FSE is too complex to be widely adopted and Elementor is easy but bloated. And there are a lot of people who would like a route out of Elementor. I have one site that is based on BuddyBoss, so I can’t use FSE anyway.

    Platforms like Kadence, Spectra, GenerateBlocks and Crocoblock require a replacement theme. It’s only Toolset and Elementor that can use other themes, such as BuddyBoss and Astra.

    The also have freemium models that are far more sustainable than Toolset’s business model in my opinion, because they make it easier for people to try elements out.

    So I would suggest:
    1. Split Toolset Types into a free plugin and an enhanced version with features the others don’t have, at a very small cost.
    2. Put most of the blocks in a free plugin, and make the more sophisticated ones, plus templating, a paid upgrade.

    The templating is a killer feature that by itself will gain customers from Elementor Pro because this makes it possible to move on from Elementor to blocks without changing the underlying theme.

    Reply

  6. Hi Ned,

    Welcome aboard. Toolset has always been my go to, just because it offers so much. Looking at the other comments above, one big improvement that would be much welocome would be an improvement to the documentation, how it is explained and how to navigate around it. I see the problem with so much legacy impletations that for all intents and purposes still work, made sense at the time and kind of need to stick around.

    So when we see the Block solutions, great, but for many of us these don’t fit our workflows (in certain instances I have used these where they made sense). Also all the builder specific solutions, which are very difficult to maintain as those said builders evolve and change the goalposts. It’s hard to keep up.

    It’s the reason why now, using Bricks, I build archives and loops (views) using raw PHP code in Brick’s Query editor (PHP) and then laying out everthing with Bricks elements. It means not having to tab over to some magic area to markup in the excellent Toolset UI and therefore breaking out of my in builder workflow.

    Looking at Kevin Geary’s Etch we are seeing a far more simplified workspace where the user can both page build and touch the html/CSS in one place.

    So taking this into account, the documentation can cater to the full on Toolset offering and also place front and centre the raw coding solutions that can be applied for many third party tools. There are some really useful code snippets, relationship related, that can be refactered directly to wrok in these tools. They just need to be more visible in the documentation.

    By the way, it’s always good to have the older Content Templates and Views UI for html/CSS/JS markup. There will always be the day when there is no other way to do something.

    Reply

  7. So does this mean Toolset will finally start getting significant new features to compete with the likes of Crocoblock, or will it continue on life-support until OTGS eventually shuts down?

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  8. Thanks so much to everyone for the warm welcome and for sharing your thoughts – I truly appreciate the honest feedback and suggestions!

    To address the questions about Toolset’s future: the plan moving forward is a continuous and steady process of improvement. Much like what we recently did with the Toolset Maps plugin, our approach is to fix bugs, enhance performance, and add new features as we work on each part of the product.

    For example, while integrating OpenStreetMap support, we took the opportunity to refactor legacy code, improve compatibility, and clean up parts of the plugin that had become outdated. This is the kind of iterative development we’re committed to – modernizing and expanding Toolset in a thoughtful way, while ensuring long-term stability.

    Toolset still has a strong foundation and with your feedback we’re aiming to make it even better.

    Reply

  9. Nice to meet you Ned!
    It’s great to hear that Toolset is moving forward again. As you can see from previous comments, people are apprehensive about using Toolset, as it seemed to stop being developed, and only do bug fixes.
    This is a bad sign. It’s also bad for users, as WP is going through big changes at the moment, and all the other CPT-management plugins are getting great new features, in particular better compatibility with page builders.
    I truly hope that we’ll be able to use again the beloved Toolset, but this depends on you more than on us 🙂
    All the best and good luck!

    Reply

  10. Welcome Ned!

    Just a note from a very long time user of Toolset – I purchased it in 2015! Time flies!

    There’s a whole lot of us power users that are building web apps or PWAs. I hand code my frontends, and my templates and views. I don’t use Gutenberg or any builders. And I don’t want to ever adopt the blocks version of Views.

    So that said, users like me always want reassurance that Legacy Views will remain available and maintained. 😃

    It’s the magic of Toolset for me! Clearly I’m not in the site/blog builder group, and understand I might be a bit of an edge case. But I really hope as the new project lead you recognize the power of Legacy Views, and continue to maintain it (shouldn’t even be a legacy plugin IMO – just an alternate option!)

    Thanks and good luck in your new role!

    Reply

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