WP Builds

So many of you are now using a Page Builder, admit it! Honestly, why wouldn't you, they are such a great way to cut hours of time out of the development process of your WordPress web site. Well, I'm sure that you've heard of Beaver Builder, one of the Page Builders that you really ought to be using. I could go into all the reasons, but suffice to say that it's polished, reliable, and as stable as a thing which holds horses! Recently the guys over at Beaver Builder released version 2.0 into the wild and Robby McCullough is here to explain all about it.

Let's be clear, this is a great story about something that we'd all like to happen to us! So you're a developer and you come up with an idea that you decide you should build. You really don't think about whether or not there is a target market and how many potential customers you're going to have, you just build it because you have the ability to do it. Then, one day, more or less by chance you meet a bunch of people who just happen to know other people who have the ability to make your product a success for you. It's the stuff of dreams.

It seems that Eric is one of those people who is always creating new things. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, I really do mean that every couple of months he's trying his hand at something new! Lucky for us, Eric is really rather good at actually delivering new things that are well made and useful, and Instant IDE is no exception. It's new, but is already a pretty robust product, with autocomplete, tree style directory navigation, colour preferences, in fact pretty much all you could want.

Since the dawn of the internet, it was pretty obvious that if you wanted to do anything other than look at "stuff that other people had put there", you were going to need forms. You can submit things to a web site and they can then parse that data, do fun things to it and then present it to you in a different way. So now there are forms everywhere! Mark Sinclair explains why SparkChart is a powerhouse survey tool for you and your clients.

The Elementor folk are thinking about the future and how the product is going to evolve over the coming year. The obvious question is how Elementor is going to align with Gutenberg which is now only a few months away. Are Gutenberg and Elementor in opposition or are they going to work in harmony together? What are the plans to introduce an Elementor Theme Builder, and will it be a new product, or an upgrade to the Pro version of the current product? Also, what’s going on in the longer term?

Well, this is going to be a nice treat for all of you folk that like a Page Builder, especially if that Page builder is called Elementor! Elementor has been growing in popularity during 2017 and has established itself as a solid platform with a reputation for being easy to use with a very generous free version. Ben joins us in Part 1 to tell us about how Elementor got to be where it is today. Who worked on it, how did they decide what to include and what to leave out. Well worth a listen.

In this episode we get to meet Bradley Kirby who has a very cool little plugin for Beaver Builder called Wallace Inline. It's really rather cool, and allows you to update the contents of your Beaver Builder pages without actually using the Beaver Builder dialogue boxes. If you've never used Beaver Builder then you need to know that when you edit content on your page, a little box opens up with all the settings for that 'module'. This plugin changes that and makes editing even more easy!

Last week we introduced you to Regina Tuzzolino and her remarkable approach to writing copy. Well, in this, the second part of the interview, Regina unpacks the ways that this method can be applied to web site copy. It’s such an innovative way to tackle what many of us don’t really like doing. Not only do we not have the required skills, but we’re often more focussed upon the way that a site looks and less upon the impact of the language that we use.

So web copy is hard to do. Some of you might be experts, but most of us are not! We struggle to find a way to make copy that is engaging and innovative; something that people will want to read. Regina has a wonderful take on how to create successful copy through her step-by-step process. It's called the 'Hero's Journey', a 12 step method of breaking down ideas into something meaningful which will resonate well with people.

In the episode we talk to Edmund Turbin about WP Engine and why you might consider it if you're in the game for a hosting provider. I'm sure that you've heard of WP Engine before, but if you haven't, they're a WordPress specific host who do WordPress and nothing else. They have been experiencing amazing growth since they were founded, and it says a lot about the WordPress ecosystem that services such as this can thrive.