[ad_1] Choosing a page builder plugin is less certain than it was even a couple of years ago, as there are lots of solutions on the market. Even so, for many users, the options boil down to Beaver Builder vs Elementor Pro. As such, this is good place to start your journey. Both of these plugins have a long-standing and distinguished pedigree among WordPress users. Each has a wealth of features and functionality, along with reasonable pricing. As such, your decision will be based on how each solution suits you and your workflow. In this post, we’ll look at Beaver Builder vs Elementor Pro in a few different areas. By the end, you’ll understand which option is right for you and why that is. A Quick Primer On Page Builders Before we move the comparison, let’s get on the same page (pun intended). For the unaware, a page builder is a way to create your site using a visual interface, rather than through code. You’ll work using a so-called ‘front end builder’. This means you’ll see the site as it will appear to users in the browser. The built-in WordPress Block Editor is great for writing blog posts and other content. Though, when it comes to layouts and site design, it’s still a baby. This functionality is improving, but you can’t yet rely on it to help you build you entire site. Enter page builders. These are third-party solutions for building your site’s layout and content. You’ll often have the functionality to customize almost every aspect of your front-end display. Some solutions will let you build custom headers and footers, and more. You’ll also find features to help you add in advanced elements such as interactive buttons, pop-ups, animations, and more. The goal of a page builder is to help you create your site without the need for code, yet with the same flexibility and scope. With regards to Beaver Builder vs Elementor Pro, both page builders have plenty to offer here. Beaver Builder vs Elementor Pro: Introducing Both Plugins The comparison is coming up, but before that, let’s introduce both Beaver Builder and Elementor Pro. Note that we’re talking about the premium versions of each plugin. While both offer free tiers, these vary in scope and functionality. In any case, most users will often opt for the fuller-featured premium solutions, so it makes sense to talk about these in the first instance. Beaver Builder Beaver Builder is the ‘elder statesman’ of page builder plugins. It’s been around for a number of years, and was one of the first page builders on the market. It’s a drag-and-drop builder, with a collection of modules that lets you add almost any piece of functionality or formatting to your site. For example, you can add a Call To Action (CTA), basic forms, video embeds, and much more: We’ve talked about Beaver Builder on the blog before. This article is worth reading to get some more context and information on how Beaver Builder works on a day-to-day basis. Elementor Pro Elementor is a relative newcomer when it comes to page builders. While it hasn’t been around for too long, it has developed a stellar reputation among end users, site owners, developers, and even investors. It’s also a drag-and-drop page builder that works as though you’re viewing your site’s front end. Much like Beaver Builder, you pull modules (‘elements’ here) into place, and work on the attributes and properties of each one. Again, there are lots of elements to choose from – you shouldn’t need to go hunting for additional elements to build your site. Because Elementor is so popular, we’ve also featured the page builder on the blog before. For a more in-depth look at how the plugin works, we encourage you to check out that post too. Beaver Builder vs Elementor Pro: Comparing Both Page Builder Plugins We’re now into the thick of this Beaver Builder vs Elementor Pro comparison. Over the next few sections, we’ll take a look at each solution and compare them in the following areas: Features, functionality, and Ease of Use 🧰. We’ll look at what each plugin can offer, along with any additional functionality provided. Support and resources 🙋. Here, we’ll look at how much support is on offer for each plugin. We’ll also look at any further resources available to help you build and manage your site. Pricing 💵. This straightforward section will look at the cost factor for each plugin. It will also touch on any free tiers, although it’s not a fair comparison (as we’ll explain). There may be some cross-over between sections. For example, ease of use and features will overlap in an organic way. As such, while we encourage you jump around the post to read about aspects that interest you, taking in the full post will let you learn the full story of each page builder. Features, Functionality, and Ease of Use 🧰 Because both Beaver Builder and Elementor Pro are popular and powerful, this comparison will be close. Each page builder offers a drag-and-drop editor as a matter of course. Elementor looks more modern in our subjective opinion, although Beaver Builder looks more like a native WordPress feature. With Elementor, you edit from the sidebar at all times. There are three panels to choose from: Layout, Style, and Advanced. This is a nice way to separate different aspects of your design, but you sometimes get the feeling there is too much for this sidebar to handle. For example, there’s also a ‘hamburger menu’ full of site-wide options, along with further menus and sub-menus. Though, we do like that there’s always a link to the Elements screen. This gives you access to all of the functionality for your site, and you can even add aspects such as Lottie animations and forms. For the latter, there’s a dedicated builder that will often mean you don’t need a plugin to do the job: As for Beaver Builder, it took us a while to
Continue readingTag Archives: Builder
A Free User Registration, Form Builder, and Profile Plugin for WordPress
[ad_1] For the past few years, ProfilePress has carved out a reputation as one of the leading tools for creating WordPress membership sites by tackling a simple yet important problem: Building a fully functioning site that is easy to manage, gives you full control, and doesn’t look like every other membership site on the planet. This last point is particularly important. After all, while there may be a host of popular WordPress user registration plugins out there, their popularity means that everyone who uses them ends up with a near-identical site. ProfilePress aims to solve this problem by giving you a simple-yet-powerful user interface through which you can create beautiful-looking sign-up forms, member directories, and user profiles that can be completely customized to match both the aesthetic design and functionality of your site. So far, so good then, but is it the right plugin for you? To help you decide, we’ve put together this complete ProfilePress plugin review, outlining everything you need to know about this all-encompassing membership tool. ProfilePress Plugin Review ProfilePress is a premium plugin that offers three different packages to suit the needs and budget requirements of most WordPress users. The entry-level Standard package profiles a one-year, single-site license which allows access to core features including: Unlimited custom frontend forms for user registrations, logins, and profile editing A comprehensive user dashboard to make it easier for your members to manage their account and profile Custom avatar uploads for users Automatic Login & Redirections Complete site control with the ability to restrict access to the WordPress dashboard depending on user roles Attractive, customizable themes for all aspects of your site Content access and restriction options. The Standard package also gives you access to 8 add-ons including: If all this isn’t enough for you, you can always upgrade to the Plus package which costs $179 per year for a three-site license and includes all of the above plus additional add-ons such as Article Continues Below User moderation User Moderation Passwordless Login BuddyPress Profile Sync Site Creation WooCommerce support Polylang integration. Finally, if even three sites aren’t enough, the Agency package will set you back $279 per year and includes everything above for unlimited sites, plus access to any additional add-ons the plugin’s developers may release in the future. With all that being said, it’s pretty easy to tell that this is one plugin that’s densely packed with useful features, but of course, the only way to truly test whether those features are any good is to put it through its paces. Using ProfilePress Once you’ve downloaded and installed ProfilePress, you’ll notice a notification that lets you know that user registration is currently disabled. Although it’s tempting to keep things this way while you work on the rest of your site, activating this now makes everything much easier to deal with. Fortunately, this isn’t a tricky task. Simply click the link labeled Settings – General in the notification, and then scroll down until you see the Membership option. From there, you can simply check the box marked Anyone can register and either leave the default user role as subscriber (recommended), or change it to something more suitable for you and your site. Creating Pages With that done, you’ll also notice a second notification that tells you that you need several pages to be created such as one for user profiles, registration, and your membership directory. The good news is that you don’t have to go through all the time-consuming hassle of creating these manually. Simply click the Create Pages button in that notification enables ProfilePress to auto-generate these pages for you and even add shortcodes to each one to provide the relevant functionality. If you wish to create new pages or change which page they are displayed on, you can do this from the plugin’s main settings page. Other Key ProfilePress Settings When you’re on the Global Settings page, you’ll notice that the plugin gives you lots of other settings that you can customize in order to really take control over the way your new membership site performs. In brief, these include: Registration settings – allow users to automatically login after registration. Login settings – Determine whether customers can login using either their email, username, or both. My account – Settings to control how the user’s account page works, including the option to redirect “Edit profile” to the main account page. Frontend profile – Determine who can view profiles and edit other settings. Redirection settings – Determine where customers will be redirected to after logging in, logging out, and changing their password. Access settings – Customize global site access by choosing whether everyone or only logged-in members can view your site. Social logins – Set up your site so that users can register and login using their favorite social media accounts. reCAPTCHA – Configure your reCAPTCHA settings for extra security. Akismet – Connect Akismet to your membership site. Creating Forms and Profiles Finally, we get to the fun stuff, using ProfilePress’s range of beautifully designed, customizable templates to create forms and user profiles. To do this, simply choose ProfilePress from your main dashboard menu, then click Forms and Profiles followed by Add New. This gives you the option to either use the simple, Drag & Drop builder or the more advanced shortcode builder to edit the pre-built designs or create something from scratch. Shortcode Builder For advanced users who know what they’re doing and want the complete freedom to tinker with the behind-the-scenes code powering their forms and profiles, a shortcode builder is an excellent tool, but if even just looking at the image above gives you a headache, you’ll no doubt prefer the easier Drag & Drop Builder much more. Drag & Drop Builder If you select the Drag & Drop builder, you’ll again be presented with separate templates for user logins, registrations, password reset options, and profile editing. If you prefer, you can also build a form from scratch, but since the templates are already well done,
Continue readingA Free User Registration, Form Builder, and Profile Plugin for WordPress
[ad_1] For the past few years, ProfilePress has carved out a reputation as one of the leading tools for creating WordPress membership sites by tackling a simple yet important problem: Building a fully functioning site that is easy to manage, gives you full control, and doesn’t look like every other membership site on the planet. This last point is particularly important. After all, while there may be a host of popular WordPress user registration plugins out there, their popularity means that everyone who uses them ends up with a near-identical site. ProfilePress aims to solve this problem by giving you a simple-yet-powerful user interface through which you can create beautiful-looking sign-up forms, member directories, and user profiles that can be completely customized to match both the aesthetic design and functionality of your site. So far, so good then, but is it the right plugin for you? To help you decide, we’ve put together this complete ProfilePress plugin review, outlining everything you need to know about this all-encompassing membership tool. ProfilePress Plugin Review ProfilePress is a premium plugin that offers three different packages to suit the needs and budget requirements of most WordPress users. The entry-level Standard package profiles a one-year, single-site license which allows access to core features including: Unlimited custom frontend forms for user registrations, logins, and profile editing A comprehensive user dashboard to make it easier for your members to manage their account and profile Custom avatar uploads for users Automatic Login & Redirections Complete site control with the ability to restrict access to the WordPress dashboard depending on user roles Attractive, customizable themes for all aspects of your site Content access and restriction options. The Standard package also gives you access to 8 add-ons including: If all this isn’t enough for you, you can always upgrade to the Plus package which costs $179 per year for a three-site license and includes all of the above plus additional add-ons such as Article Continues Below User moderation User Moderation Passwordless Login BuddyPress Profile Sync Site Creation WooCommerce support Polylang integration. Finally, if even three sites aren’t enough, the Agency package will set you back $279 per year and includes everything above for unlimited sites, plus access to any additional add-ons the plugin’s developers may release in the future. With all that being said, it’s pretty easy to tell that this is one plugin that’s densely packed with useful features, but of course, the only way to truly test whether those features are any good is to put it through its paces. Using ProfilePress Once you’ve downloaded and installed ProfilePress, you’ll notice a notification that lets you know that user registration is currently disabled. Although it’s tempting to keep things this way while you work on the rest of your site, activating this now makes everything much easier to deal with. Fortunately, this isn’t a tricky task. Simply click the link labeled Settings – General in the notification, and then scroll down until you see the Membership option. From there, you can simply check the box marked Anyone can register and either leave the default user role as subscriber (recommended), or change it to something more suitable for you and your site. Creating Pages With that done, you’ll also notice a second notification that tells you that you need several pages to be created such as one for user profiles, registration, and your membership directory. The good news is that you don’t have to go through all the time-consuming hassle of creating these manually. Simply click the Create Pages button in that notification enables ProfilePress to auto-generate these pages for you and even add shortcodes to each one to provide the relevant functionality. If you wish to create new pages or change which page they are displayed on, you can do this from the plugin’s main settings page. Other Key ProfilePress Settings When you’re on the Global Settings page, you’ll notice that the plugin gives you lots of other settings that you can customize in order to really take control over the way your new membership site performs. In brief, these include: Registration settings – allow users to automatically login after registration. Login settings – Determine whether customers can login using either their email, username, or both. My account – Settings to control how the user’s account page works, including the option to redirect “Edit profile” to the main account page. Frontend profile – Determine who can view profiles and edit other settings. Redirection settings – Determine where customers will be redirected to after logging in, logging out, and changing their password. Access settings – Customize global site access by choosing whether everyone or only logged-in members can view your site. Social logins – Set up your site so that users can register and login using their favorite social media accounts. reCAPTCHA – Configure your reCAPTCHA settings for extra security. Akismet – Connect Akismet to your membership site. Creating Forms and Profiles Finally, we get to the fun stuff, using ProfilePress’s range of beautifully designed, customizable templates to create forms and user profiles. To do this, simply choose ProfilePress from your main dashboard menu, then click Forms and Profiles followed by Add New. This gives you the option to either use the simple, Drag & Drop builder or the more advanced shortcode builder to edit the pre-built designs or create something from scratch. Shortcode Builder For advanced users who know what they’re doing and want the complete freedom to tinker with the behind-the-scenes code powering their forms and profiles, a shortcode builder is an excellent tool, but if even just looking at the image above gives you a headache, you’ll no doubt prefer the easier Drag & Drop Builder much more. Drag & Drop Builder If you select the Drag & Drop builder, you’ll again be presented with separate templates for user logins, registrations, password reset options, and profile editing. If you prefer, you can also build a form from scratch, but since the templates are already well
Continue readingWirecutter’s Website Builder for 2021: Wix • WPShout
[ad_1] This is an interesting little tidbit for “the web industry” generally, and where it interfaces with real people with non-internet-focused lives and careers. The Wirecutter—the de facto site for time-starved yuppies to quickly find an acceptable-to-great version of a product category (aka, how I buy almost everything)—recommends Wix for those looking to make a website. Now, if you’re reading this site (WPShout) you probably know of another tool or service: WordPress. They did look at WordPress.com. They did not look at “a WordPress site on (your favorite host) with Elementor/Beaver Builder/etc.” And nor do they seem to have been particularly worried about “ease of porting your site” or “ease of augmenting the site with nerdy features.” And you won’t find the term “open source” or “license” anywhere on the page. For those not following me, the last paragraph is some of the reasons us WordPress folks tend to like to use it. But neither Melanie Pinola (the page’s author) nor its primary audience is thinking about those things. And that’s fine. Good even! And as “a WordPress professional” you benefit from always keeping that gap in mind. The arguments and benefits that lead Wix (and after that, Square—the payments people) to be the best for Wirecutter readers are places and spaces that WordPress (or whatever other nerdy CMS you’re into) can and should go to stay vital and relevant in the industry. I think the Gutenberg project is continuing to play out as a long-bet for the future of WordPress, and I remain bullish on it. But clearly winning all the battles for the home for “people needing a website” is something that WordPress has not beat the whole world at. (Yet.) (Hat tip to the Post Status Newsletter for this link) Visit nytimes.com → [ad_2] Source link
Continue readingAn Intuitive WordPress Page Builder
[ad_1] Are you wondering how Visual Composer performs? Visual Composer was amongst the first page-builders to be released into the market. It has been around for a long period of time. However, as years passed by, tons of changes and updates were made to this plugin to improve its functionality. Apart from that, other page builders came into the picture, creating some competition. Due to this, the Visual Composer plugin is updated on a regular basis. While the WPBakery page builder was known as Visual Composer, it is not the same product as the ReactJS-based Visual Composer. The WPBakery plugin and the ReactJS-based Visual Composer plugin are two different page builders developed by the same team. Not to mention, the Visual Composer page builder is not short-code-based. In this post, we will take you through the different features that Visual Composer offers you. Let’s dig in. Drag-and-drop Editor Visual Composer comes with a drag-and-drop editor, making it easier to add various elements to your site pages. Not to mention, the drag-and-drop editor lets you customize your site from the front-end. It features real-time customization functionalities for updating a website whenever a change is made. The drag and drop editor has a side menu, which is intuitive and easy to use. It opens up easily, giving you access to elements, blocks, and templates. What’s more? The side menu also packs different customization settings and options that help you style various elements based on your personal preferences. Such options may vary from one element to another, depending on the functionality of the element. For instance, if you plan to edit a button, you can easily access padding options from the side menu. Article Continues Below Plus, this page builder offers you a quick action box for customizing and editing various elements. Some of the functionalities featured on the quick action box make it easier for you to edit, delete, and clone an element. Unlike the sidebar menu, the action box appears when you hover the mouse cursor over a certain element. Apart from that, the drag-and-drop editor is compatible with various WordPress themes. Elements Visual Composer comes with tons of elements that can transform your site completely. Examples of such elements include: Basic button Faq toggle Feature section Image gallery Image masonry Outline button Youtube player Vimeo player Image slider Instagram image As if that’s enough, Visual Composer has basic customization options for editing and styling all those elements. Such options let you align various elements in your site based on your preferences. There are three different alignment options; left, right, and middle. As if that is enough, you can change the shape of an element to suit your style. While some customization options might be used to edit all elements, some elements have unique customizations options. Moreover, Visual Composer has premium elements for extending a site’s functionality, taking it to the next level. These are some of the premium elements that Visual Composer offers you: Advanced custom fields Animated outline button Facebook comment Video popup WP forms Post slider It gets better. Visual Composer packs more than 15 WooCommerce elements, making it easier for you to add various functionalities to your eCommerce store. Whether you are planning to add a WooCommerce cart or list products in your eCommerce store, Visual Composer will help you achieve that. Templates Visual Composer packs more than 160-page templates that can be easily incorporated into your WordPress site to make it look elegant. Such pre-designed templates are suitable for websites that are in different niches. Some of the templates offered by this page builder might be ideal for photography sites, travel sites, online businesses, financial sites, digital developers, corporate sites, and other types of sites. Instead of developing a whole WordPress site from scratch, you can use such templates to style up your WordPress pages. Furthermore, Visual Composer also offers you tons of pre-designed blocks that can style up different sections of your site. For instance, you can use a call-to-action block to create a stylish call-to-action section in your WordPress site, displaying various information. With more than 160 pre-designed blocks, Visual composer can help you style up your WordPress site quite easily. Theme Builder The theme builder has various functionalities and settings that help you customize various parts of your theme, such as footers, headers, and sidebars. The theme builder can be used to create a post header or a global header that will appear on all the pages. Well, you can either choose the per post type option or the sitewide option based on your preferences. Moreover, the theme builder layout settings offer you various functionalities for creating a 404 page, a post archive page, an author page, and a search page. Visual Composer Hub As the name hints, cloud storage has a wide array of pre-designed blocks, templates, headers, sidebars, footers, and elements. In short, the Visual Composer hub is a storage space that lets you download various elements that can style up your site. What’s more, you ask? Visual Composer hub also gives you access to stock images, which can be used in different sections of your WordPress site. Such images can be downloaded directly to your site from Unsplash via the Visual Composer hub. Pop up Builder Since Visual composer comes with a pop-up builder, you can create pop-ups on your site to boost your conversions and display various notification messages to your visitors. Apart from that, the pop-up builder is quite effective in building pop-ups from the front end of your website. With this builder, you can create page-specific pop-ups or site-wide popups, which have animation effects to improve the overall style of your site. Integrations Visual Composer integrates with multiple third-party apps, offering a wide array of functionalities that help you accomplish different things. Here are some of the third-party apps that Visual Composer integrates with: Contact Form Applications Contact form apps and plugins can create a form, which visitors can use to get in touch with you.
Continue reading“The Block Editor Gets Ready to Become a Site Builder” – WordPress Tavern
[ad_1] Matt Mullenweg and Matías Ventura joined WordCamp Europe to chat about what’s happening with the Gutenberg project and celebrate the progress contributors have made over the past four years. “For me, 2020 was the year that really felt like people started to see the vision of Gutenberg from four or five years ago, when it was very abstract and they saw it as kind of like the old WYSIWYG editor with some extra lines on it or something,” Mullenweg said. “The first 17 or 18 years of WordPress democratized people putting text into a box. Now we’re democratizing design, allowing people to control the boxes.” Ventura commented on how transformative patterns have been for making page design approachable for users. “Perhaps it was a smaller part of the roadmap initially but it’s becoming a centerpiece – especially because it allows…world class designers to provide a starting point for users and users get to learn design as they are interacting with themes,” Ventura said. He began his WordPress developer journey by “tinkering with themes,” as many others did, and believes that blocks can unlock a similar experimental learning experience. “I think we are getting into a chapter where people will be able to tinker with things that were sort of hidden for you in WordPress – more advanced things like queries and loops, that we can now expose through blocks,” Ventura said. “They can be stepping stones for people to learn how to work with WordPress.” Mullenweg commented on how things that previously would have required a fairly experienced WordPress developer to do, like creating a home page with a column that shows five recent posts from a particular category, and another column that shows featured posts in a different category, you can now do with just a few clicks. “It’s no code – it’s like expanding the layers of accessibility of what people are able to do with WordPress,” Mullenweg said. “That, to me, is very core to our mission.” Mullenweg and Ventura debuted a new “Gutenberg highlight” video that covers current and new features coming to the block editor, as it “gets ready to become a site builder.” These kinds of marketing videos are so valuable because users don’t always know what is possible, even if the tools are approachable for anyone to use. The video demonstrates new design features for different blocks, including the transform live previews, dragging media into container blocks, inline cropping without leaving the editor canvas, the template editor, duotone image filters, more customization options for navigation, improvements to the list view browser, and the new global styles design that is coming soon. Check out the video below and you can also watch Mullenweg and Ventura’s conversation that was recorded during the event. Like this: Like Loading… [ad_2] Source link
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