Episode 69: Maintenance Services and Page Builder Plugins

Today’s podcast episode is sponsored by SearchWP. This search plug-in takes the WP search engine and supercharges it, giving you complete flexibility. It allows you to search your e-commerce files, build custom search engines, have multiple search engines on your site, and so much more. Go check them out to learn about all of their features.

Brad’s Update

Brad recently had a challenging week at home, because his wife was traveling and he had to take over all of the childcare duties, but he managed to get through it while still running his company. At work, there was a problem with customers not being able to connect to the API. It turned out to be an IPV6 issue. Brad is also organizing Big Snow Tiny Conf, an annual snowboard and ski conference for people with web-based business.

Pippin’s Update

AffiliateWP 1.9 release went out, and there were a couple of little hiccups, so a few point releases also went out. An update for the Group Accounts update of Restricte Content Pro is ready to go out soon. Pippin put out a new blog post about how to sell services with EDD. There is also a new update for the free downloads plug-in.

Some of the topics discussed today include:

Why WP developers and product companies should sell monitoring and maintenance services with websites.

Pippin’s thoughts on page-builders, including his process for evaluating various ones.

The three top page-builders, according to Pippin’s research and the user experience.

Links and Resources:

Big Snow Tiny Conf

Hey WordPress Developers, Sell Maintenance Service With Your Sites

Escrow.com

Selling Services With Easy Digital Downloads

WP Page Builder Plugins: A Critical Review

Tailor Page-Builder

Pootle Page-Builder

Beaver Builder

If you’re enjoying the show we sure would appreciate a Review in iTunes. Thanks!

Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Apply Filters, the podcast all about WordPress development. Now here’s your hosts, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard.

PIPPIN: Welcome back to Episode 69 of Apply Filters. Today Brad and I are going to go over some of the updates that we’ve been up to, as well as some plans that are coming up for various things.

But first, this episode is sponsored by SearchWP, a wonderful plugin from Jonathan Christopher. SearchWP takes the WordPress search engine and supercharges it. It gives you complete flexibility that allows you to make your search forms search within e-commerce orders, PDF files, and custom post type and whatever other kind of content you have on your website. It allows you to build custom search engines that are specific to the exact needs that you have.

You could even have multiple search engines on your site. For example, you could have one that does e-commerce orders, you could have one that does products, and you could have one that does blog posts. It’s a powerful search plugin, and it’s available at SearchWP.com.

BRAD: One thing I love about SearchWP is that you can just drop it in and it just works. It just makes the search better.

PIPPIN: Yeah, which is awesome because it’s got all of the extra features in it that allow you to do things like the e-commerce data or the PDF files. But those are completely optional.

BRAD: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. Great piece of software. I also like the attention to detail that Jonathan has put into the user interface. I remember when I first installed it and it started to do its indexing. It shows that progress bar of the indexing. Yeah, it’s pretty nicely–

PIPPIN: That’s another thing to mention is that because of the index, it keeps a complete index of all of the content on the site. I believe it has a separate index for each search engine that you build. It means that searching is actually much more performant because we’re not actually doing raw database queries of your content. It’s actually looking at an efficient index.

BRAD: Yeah, that’s right.

PIPPIN: All