Nathan Wrigley: 00:00 Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, David Waumsley, Nathan Wrigley.
Nathan Wrigley: 00:21 Hello there, and welcome to this episode 142 of the WPU builds podcast. This episode is entitled Easy Life Story or layouts in the cloud with Andrew Palmer. It was published on Thursday the 22nd of August, 2019 my name is Nathan Wrigley from picture and word.co. Dot. UK, a small web development agency based in the north of England. And before we get to our interview with Andrew Palmer, I've just got a couple of requests to make of you and that is that you head over to the WP Builds.com website because over there you're going to find everything that we do, but we do of course repurpose our content into various different silos over the internet and I'll explain more about that in a moment. The first link I'd like you to look at in the main navigation at the top is the subscribe link and they will be able to subscribe to one of our two newsletters.
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Nathan Wrigley: 02:50 Okay, today we're talking to Andrew Palmer who has a new product called the page builder cloud. It allows you to save a ton of time by taking the layouts that you've made in your favorite page builder. So maybe it's beaver builder, elementor breezy, or a whole host of others and saving them into the cloud. It will then enable you to log into another WordPress website and simply press a button and pull that layout down into the new website. So if you've got an agency or if you're making a bunch of websites, this is a really cool way of being able to find and throw layouts all over your different websites. And so yeah, very, very cool indeed. Now, I'm not 100% sure that the, the pricing that we mentioned in this is going to be exactly the same. It was a bit in flux at the time we recorded it, which was over a month ago. So if it is still the price that we mentioned, fantastic. And if not, don't worry too much. It's still gonna be an incredible deal because the pricing is very, very aggressive indeed. And so without further ado, I bring you Andrew Palmer. Hello there. Thank you for joining us. Once more, this is the WP Builds interview this week. And today I have on the line, Andrew Palmer. How are you doing, Andrew?
Andrew Palmer: 04:01 All right, well, nice and good to talk to you this morning.
Nathan Wrigley: 04:03 Yeah, I always think it's funny when we start these recordings with this, this pretense that we've just found each other up and we're just about to just about to launch into a conversation when the reality is we've been chatting for about half an hour about all sorts of things. But nevertheless, Andrew is the cofounder of elegant marketplace, which is something that I'm sure many of you have not only heard off, but perhaps bought things from. He's the owner of layouts, cloud.com. He's also the owner of something which we're going to dwell on a lot, a lot today, which is called page builder cloud. We get stuck into that right in a few minutes time, but right now, Andrew, do you wanna just tell us a little bit about your backstory, how you ended up being in WordPress and all of the things surrounding WordPress?
Andrew Palmer: 04:43 Well, um, because I'm not yet particularly young man, young, young in mind and everything. But, um, I probably got into WordPress about 10 years ago. I was building websites, uh, html, went to college for one night a week. I was a printer or I had a printing company and we used to supply a company that is now in the UK called virgin media and it was called NTL and we were the sole supplier of those and other people like travel x and big, big corporates basically. And I said to my guys in the print industry, I said, look, we've got to get into the website somehow and is 1998 I think. So I went to college and I sorted myself out with that printing business. Eventually got sold. Um, I then set up a little agency, creative agency, had some, a website too. It got into CD printing in a big way, helped talk, talk, do that launch, you know, printed all their 10 million cds in the first year and all that kind of stuff.
Andrew Palmer: 05:39 So, you know, really production marketing collateral stuff. Um, and then a very lovely chap called Mark Copeman who um, established a beautiful business cold and I'm desperately trying to remember what it is, customer thermometer, uh, he's just actually sold that. And he's just written a book called help desk habits, which is a fantastic book. Anybody who deals with support, like I do daily needs to read this book. It's phenomenal. Um, but mark Copeman said, what on earth are you doing using Joomla? You should be using WordPress. So I, you know, I did what I was told and I went into WordPress and within 20 minutes I hated his guts and WordPress. And I just said, I'm not doing this. This is just too difficult. How on earth do I set a home page and how do I do this? What supposed, what's a page? What's a, what's a custom post type?
Andrew Palmer: 06:35 I have no idea. And I hate WordPress. I'm never going to do this again. So, uh, umpteen phone calls and his patients, uh, was just unbelievable. Um, you know, I started then building WordPress websites, got into it, made some, uh, nice in roads into it, set up a little reseller hosting thing with um, heart internet now transferring that to 20i in the UK who are just phenomenal. The previous owners of heart Internet who are now owned by go daddy, met some guys and the girl and we set up elegant marketplace.com, uh, four years ago. And um, then you know, had the idea to start layouts, cloud.com it started off with Divi cloud because it's really, um, basic. You save your Divi layouts to the cloud and you can reuse them on your own Divi websites. So you get 10 hours a month on freelance, uh, 20 lots a month on, um, agency premium staff and then give away the plugin for free where you get access to hundreds of layouts actually and get one free lout a month.
Andrew Palmer: 07:42 So that's the kind of free version. And then I thought, okay, why don't we do this for other page builders? And therefore page builder cloud came along. Now obviously I'm more of an ideas person. I'm not a coder. And I think a lot of people in our community, certainly in the Divi community, uh, for better or worse know Sean Barton, he happens to be, um, a legend in his own lifetime. Um, programming wise, you know, he does the Wu Lao injector and does custom post type injection and loads. He's got about 22 plugins on elegant marketplace and he built a lance cloud.com, the plugin Divi cloud plugin. So, you know, I went to him and I said, look, surely we can do this for other page builders and we have, it's all ready to go. Um, and we'll be launching next Monday. But previous to that, I've, I've got a lot of business experience in other businesses.
Andrew Palmer: 08:45 You know, I've been working since I was 16. I owned a dispatch company for awhile, you know, motorcycle career company. I had a couple of printing businesses, I've had three and I help restauranters launch their restaurants. One of them, uh, literally within the last two months in Wimbledon. Nice little restaurant called Chen Tawny, which means a hundred years in Italian. Um, and help them to help them run their websites, help them run their staff, you know, do all the kind of induction training. So, you know, I've got a very varied kind of consultancy business that I run on there that somebody could, it's called somebody's hero.co. Dot. UK and that helps me, uh, make ends meet if you like, because elegant marketplace is almost a vanity pro project in as much as it's a community project. It doesn't make a, an awful lot of money. The money kind of goes to the vendors and supporting the, the support guys that I have to employ to oversee, get back to customers about pricing issues or payment issues or anything like that. So it's more or less a community project if you like. So that's, that's, that's what I like about it.
Nathan Wrigley: 09:57 They just, I will come back and touch on those three products in a moment. But I'm just wondering, you, you sort of obviously embedded your whole life in WordPress and you know, from the sounds of it right at the beginning you were kind of reluctant to give it a go and now it now is the, the root of everything. Having had such a sort of broad and deep history in it and you know, you've, you've got your fingers in many pies and I think a lot of the people listening to this podcast are people who purchase themes, purchase plugins and that kind of thing. How do you feel about the, the sort of future of WordPress? I know that the statistics say that it's growing, but from the point of view of a vendor, um, selling themes and so on, it does that feel to be true? Do you feel that like WordPress is still growing or is the kind of theme marketplace shrinking rather than growing?
Andrew Palmer: 10:43 I think it's, it's doing both. It's growing. As, you know, when we started, there was only one marketplace for Divi themes. Um, now everybody in that, then their dog calls their, their theme store a marketplace, even if they're only selling their own themes. Um, which is a bit cheeky really, but you know, there's only one real competitor and they're very good Divi cake. Um, you know, they basically got the same developers as we've got. They've got a couple of that. We haven't, we've got about 10 that they haven't, you know, all that kind of thing. So I think what, what's happened certainly in the Divi Ecosphere is that the choice has increased. Right. You know, so you don't have it. This is not just elegant marketplace now. And of course Divi have caught up with people like elementor and beaver builder and all the other page builders and now offer layouts within their own theme.
Andrew Palmer: 11:39 People say, oh, they're so basic or they're so whatever. But actually they're great. I really liked them. I think it's a great idea for these theme people to put, um, both offer elegant themes to put their own layouts in there. Cause it again increases choice. And if you want something specific like a contractor or a builder or a dentist or a doctor or a yoga place, you can get those from places like elegant marketplace or any other, any number of, I think it's, I can't, for them, the other day was about hundred businesses that are worth looking at to sell the, are selling layouts. Wow. But I think it's the layouts that are, um, lay out some plugins, specific plugins for the specific themes, you know, so beaver builder have got their own specific plugins. Um, you've got, um, Divi you've got brutal press. I mean, you know, James who owns pootle press, he's really, really concentrating on Gutenberg at the moment.
Andrew Palmer: 12:40 You follow him on Twitter, you'll see that he's doing good and Blip Bud blogs, Gutenberg blocks for woocommerce. Yeah. Um, it's only a page level at the moment. You know, things like we lay out injector for Divi, that's everything we would commerce, you know, you can do the checkout, you can do the account page, you can do everything at that and set them up more at more or less as custom post types. So people are now realizing the people are either buyers of themes and layouts and plugins that realizing that there's so much more choice. And you know, to be honest, when you can buy a layout for 10 bucks or you can join the ounce count for $10 a month or $20 a month and have a choice of 800 layouts, you can't really go wrong. You know, um, you know, if you by generate press, now you've got a choice of elements allowance in there.
Andrew Palmer: 13:32 If you buy Astra, you've got a phenomenal choice of layouts that are already built into the theme. The will, I think, trying to answer your question effectively, when you bought the theme off in envato, let's take the Be theme. For instance, if you bought B theme, you got 300 themes in one. Wow. Wow. It's crazy. Yeah. Because you've got literally every single genre in there that you can think of and some that you can't, um, and different styles and different designs and different pages. So if you're buying something, I don't know how much bee theme is 100 bucks or something, but you're buying 300 themes. You could literally run your own agency on one theme and only spend that $100. You might have to spend $100 a year because I think, um, elegant themes and oxygen are the only ones that are doing kind of lifetime deals on there.
Andrew Palmer: 14:29 Yeah, that sounds about right. You know, and even oxygens are now selling or not selling or adding, um, layouts. So, you know, so it's really easy for anybody to go out there and build a website. It might be rubbish, but you know, you can do a website and I think having been lucky enough to go to WCU, you know, in Berlin what WordCamp Europe heard Matt speak about, you know, what's happening with Gutenberg, then you get a plethora of people that are selling Gutenberg louts so you can import them directly into WordPress and you've got all the, yeah, yeah. You don't have to have any worries. Um, and, and good and buggies becoming more and more of a page builder. I think where the market is going to struggle is to page builder market. I mean, you know, if you talk to the guys at beaver builder elements or Divi, you know that they are struggling to keep up with each other because they're always trying to innovate and they're trying to, you know, let's put a bill in, pop up, let's do some motion effects, let's do some, um, 3d effects.
Andrew Palmer: 15:37 Let's make these plugins do everything that they can do. Um, without having all uses code. And there's a, there's a bit of controversy in all of the groups. You know, you go elementor is 40,000 people in elements of Facebook group now. Wow. 34,000 in the group that I used to Admin, the Divi theme users group. And there are people now kicking at the door saying, can you stop this bloat? Can you stop making these themes? Try to do so much. You know, we've got third party solutions out there. We'll use those if we need to. We don't want this bloat. And it's taking a lot of power, you know, from hosts, you have to have maximum PHP versions, you know, 7.3 or something. You have to have a maximum memory to run all of these page builders and let me give you a little secret hidden nice.
Andrew Palmer: 16:27 And all the page builders are broken in some way. You know, it's not just Divi that's broken. It's not just elementary or beaver builder. There are some things that come out of these things. When you try and do some stuff on the web, it'll give you a 500 error. It's not necessarily the theme or plugin that's broken. It could be your hosting, it could be a plugging conflict. You know, when you're thinking about 40,000 plus plugins on the WordPress repository, how on earth can anything builder or plugin builder or page builder know whether they can, there's not going to be a conflict with any or all of those plugins, right? Without testing them. So again, to try answer your question, I think what the way forward is layouts and storage of those layouts. Hence page with the cloud and also plugins that are very specific to that particular page builder or that particular, if you're just using WordPress and obviously you've got all the WordPress plugins and Code Canyon involved, so in the theme forest and all that kind of stuff, but it's basically people aren't struggling with how to use WordPress these days because it is so easy.
Andrew Palmer: 17:38 You know, if he can get over the, if you've got one click installs on every single hosting company, you've got backups pretty much on every single hosting company. If you're paying $20 plus a month, you've got security solutions like blog vault.com and malware. You know, they're there, there are ultimate solutions out there, but people are comparing or trying to compare page builders with what's happening on wix.com and um, you know, Shopify and all those kinds of things. Those are very specialist areas for real newbies. You know, I was a a panel and I asked the question or I basically made a statement of people were saying the onboarding process for Wix is much easier. Well, yeah, you've got one login, you know, then it's all set up with WordPress. You've got to log ins, you control panel, you've got to set up WordPress, you've got to put all your security stuff in manually. You know, there is a, there is a, a market, you know, WP engine and flywheel have now joined together. Yeah. There is that market obviously, um, for managed WordPress. But I mean right from the get go, yeah, here I am, I'm Andrew Palmer. I need a website, push me in and set up my set up my WordPress sites so that it's all secure. The caching is correct and I've got the essential must use plugins in there and give me a theme as well.
Nathan Wrigley: 19:04 Yeah. That's what these big boys are doing. They're definitely heading towards that. You know, purchase, purchase, WP engine's planned or whatever the company might be is planning and never think again, you just interact with WordPress. That's it. It's all set up.
Andrew Palmer: 19:18 Exactly right. Go, go. Daddy have had it for ages. I mean, you know they bought, who did they buy managed WP or Yep, that's right. Yep. So they bought them because, because they realize that people are people and we don't have the time to read the manual. We just don't, we just don't have the time. So you know, we could make time that could be said, but we don't read the manual. Some people don't even know which side the indicator is on in their car because they don't read them. It's that simple, Kenny. No wisdom. Oh there it is. But they don't look at the other things or the anti-skid button that they can press to stop them skidding when they've got to make an emergency break. And that's, that's what I'm saying about WordPress and web design really is anybody now can be a web designer. You can see it in the Facebook groups, every single one of them. I've built a few websites for my account for my friends on thinking of starting an agency. But you know what, good luck with that. It's like I've been doing it for 30 years. It's still hard. It's still difficult to get content from people. It's still difficult to get payment from people and it's still difficult to really excel in what you do and remain competitive.
Nathan Wrigley: 20:31 One of the, I'm sorry, I was just going to say one of the, one of the sort of things that I see as the growth area of, of WordPress is, is the continuing, um, adoption of things like Gutenberg and it's, and it's, and it's slow, but ascent towards being a page builder like you said. But I'm, the problem still remains that we've got these kind of, um, little enclave. So you've got a whole crowd of people over here using, uh, let's say beaver builder and you've got a whole crowd over here using elementor and so on and so forth. Um, and they're all sort of, you know, they don't necessarily talk to each other too much and moving from one to the other, despite the fact that you've spent ages using beaver builder. If you suddenly want to start using elementary, you've got to launch on that road all over again.
Nathan Wrigley: 21:18 And so on. So that's, that's kind of why I'm really intrigued by this. This thing that you've got coming out now, you said it was coming out probably Monday. That's, that's probably now in the past. By the time that we've put this out, I had a, I had a glimpse of it the other day and it strikes me that this product that you've got page builder cloud is something that somebody needed to have built. Um, it would have been great if we could have had it, I don't know, six, six to eight months ago, possibly a couple of years ago. But do you want to just give us like the elevator pitch for what it is and what it does?
Andrew Palmer: 21:51 Well, so basically any page builder that you're using in your WordPress website, you put in the plugin page, build a cloud, and you can save that layout to your own cloud instance. So it's all totally secure. And if you want, it's a SAS product as you know, software as a service. So it's, uh, an annual premium. The, the basis of it is, is that if you're using beaver builder and you are a development company or you're just a startup web agency and you, you know, you want to reuse your layouts, uh, specifically it would be a builder and a, uh, an elementary. I think you still have to export them as a, as an XML file. So rather than do that, and also to keep, um, a proper named archive with categories, we set up page builder cloud. So we use Divi cloud as a, as a model.
Andrew Palmer: 22:41 Then we, we moved to into elements of cloud, which is Laos, manager.com. And we thought, do you know what, why don't we do this for every single page builder out there that we can. So all you do is, you know, for, for Gutenberg is the easiest one to do. So you, you've built your gutenberg blocks, you don't really want to explore them. You know, you just want to keep that somewhere safe that you can amend it or, or, or use it for another customer. Um, because it's all about we using stuff, you know, and I've got this idea from you reusing old content. Well, why don't you just reuse designs that you've done changed the color way, agent, text, whatever you, you, you need to do. So we Gutenberg, you've got page builder cloud in there, you save the page and then you go to pages and you hover over the page that you've just saved and magically appears safe to cloud.
Andrew Palmer: 23:33 You then install your page, build a cloud plugin on another WordPress instance. And let me get, you haven't got any other page builders in there. It's just Gutenberg and you go to your cloud, um, or you go to insert a page and it comes up. We page builder cloud in there, there's your good and louts there and you apply them to the page, save it. And there, there it is. You just carry on working on it. Uh, and the same applies for Divi elements or WP bakery site origin, pootle press. Um, yeah and Gutenberg in there. That's amazing. That just, and we're putting, we're putting visual, I mean WP bakery people get confused between WP Baker and visual builder or visual visual proposal. Yeah. They're two separate plugins. Uh, and I know this cause I had a meeting with visual composer but then we had a nice little chat and they took me all through it and it was looking beautiful.
Andrew Palmer: 24:27 Um, so visual builder will go in there and basically in time there will be compatibility for every single page builder that's out there. You know, we put site origin in because it's got one and a half million downloads in the repository. We put Google press in there because I really liked James. I think he's a great guy. And I think, you know, he's got some real good stuff going on with Gutenberg and WP bakery. We put in there, because there's millions of themes, hundreds of thousands of themes that you buy from Envato that we've got WP bakery. So you can now people that have got those seams can save those louts and, and reuse them. And that's, that's the, that is the basic basis of page builder.
Nathan Wrigley: 25:14 Wow. So the principle is that you install, so this would be like really useful for somebody, um, who, who runs an agency or builds and multiple websites every year. Uh, you've got a design that you really like. You've maybe even created a website where you've just created a whole bunch of designs which are reusable across your entire business and you can, you click a bottom, it saves it presumably with a name or something that you, that you give it, which makes it a unique and individual. You can tag it in some way or categorize it and then go to your, let's say you've, you've just suddenly received a new, a new job and you've, you know, you're going to build a website, go over there, install the plugin, and then you then download all of the, the layouts that you wish from your cloud and wait a few seconds and boom, they're there.
Andrew Palmer: 26:04 Well, you don't download it. You just kicked page builder cloud on all those pages come up and you, ah, yes, you hit apply. So you just, you got a little visual representation, like a thumbnail do. It takes a, well, it takes a, takes a screen grab and then makes that into a scrolling screen grabs so that you can see everything on the page, right. Um, which is pretty good. And um, then you can say, okay, well that's the one I want to use for this one. I'll just apply that and puts it to the page, save the page in a way you go and at will does it bring,
Nathan Wrigley: 26:34 um, does it bring like the, the actual content as well? Or are we just talking about the design? So let's say for example, that I'd written a bunch of, uh, highly important text. Does it bring across those exact words or is it just the way it looks?
Andrew Palmer: 26:46 Yes, it does. And that's one of the thing that we're looking at because, and it also brings across the images and or video links that you've, you've got there as well. Um, but the, the whole point of that is it that it gives you everything, but it will link, it links back to the images where you originally saved. Got It. So you know, you've got to watch it, you know, if you're using a development so they make sure your server is powerful enough. Right. But you know, we always suggest to people change the images and change the links and everybody does it brings the whole page and whatever was on that page when you saved it.
Nathan Wrigley: 27:19 yeah, so a good idea. Good idea might be to, I don't know, use something like an Amazon bucket or something for all your images and then they're just sort of sitting there waiting and it doesn't really matter that you've got them on different sites and so on.
Andrew Palmer: 27:29 Yeah, that's exactly it. If you're using a CDN on your, on your, um, you know, a content delivery network like Amazon or something, you could, you know, you can just use that bandwidth. But you know, we see it just because you are, the intent is to change that design completely or to change the images completely and change the text. But you've got the layout there. Yeah. You've got the, the design has been done. Yeah. But any of the assets that are attached to that design will still sit on your original web server wherever you've, you've saved them.
Nathan Wrigley: 28:02 Yeah. So I can see myself using this in setting up a website, which has nothing to do with the real world. It's simply a website where I just chuck all my designs and build them all over there and then go to the site that I want to actually work on and then bring them across if you're not going to. So I've got this one repository, which is mine, my WordPress, my designs, all of them, you know, tagged and categorize maybe by, I don't know, the kind of industry or whether they're modern or retro or colorful or dark or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. That's app. Why hasn't anybody done this? Wow.
Andrew Palmer: 28:39 I don't know. I think, I think there's a couple of people that, you know, brainstorm force. I mean, what a great name for a company. I met the guys again. Well, what can Europe? Um, and notably, and I am having a Paul Pia, notably the only page builder guys that weren't, they were Divi where, where are you? Just the, and I haven't made a comment to them about that. I just don't, you know, don't ignore Europe. We mass if it's a massive, massive area. Um, and it's really uh, engaged Europe is really engaged in WordPress and you know, not to come to the biggest WordPress event in Europe was just a bit, I found that actually Jody annoying, I was a bit annoyed that they, you know, add them into with their beaver builder was there, uh, you know, the whole elements team of really engaging, you know, pool press was there. James was there, he was actually one of the photographers there. Um, you know, Charlie from A Themes was there, he's got particularly successful business going on down in Bristol in the UK. You've got every other person, visual composer was there where with Divi, where was elegant themes in Europe. Just annoyed me.
Nathan Wrigley: 29:51 Yeah, you'll, you'll have to wait and see how the reply comes back to you. And
Andrew Palmer: 29:54 I don't think they will. We're concentrating on, on America really. And I think that any is a, that's not forget as 300 million people in America. It's a massive market. But I think just to pop across, there are tons of Americans that, so people did make the effort. Um,
Nathan Wrigley: 30:11 I was actually talking to one of the cofounders of WordCamp Europe on, on the, um, on a different podcast recently. And he was saying, you know, when it was originally conceived, it was very much supposed to be a European thing, but now it's, uh, it's got like a global thing. In fact, you could almost, this is going to sound ridiculous and I'm sorry, North America, it feels almost like it's WordCamp world. I'm not really world your, you know, the cause is everybody from everywhere.
Andrew Palmer: 30:37 Well yeah, we had, we, you know, we've got, we have, um, ash cat from blog, volt. Yeah. Come down. We had the, you know, the cloud ways guys that run cloud guys. Yeah. Um, you know, everybody just making an appearance, you know, these come from India and Malaysia and you know, halfway across the world, Australia and Google. Yeah. Um, you know, so I was just the obvious, just slightly, I was disappointed more than anything else than not to see the elegant themes, people that just make sure that, um, it was, you know, that they were, they were present.
Nathan Wrigley: 31:09 Yeah. So, um, you've got it ready. I mean by Monday, like I said, that will be the past. You've presumably, um, check this out and you know, you've had it Beta tested by various people. Have you run across any notable roadblocks along the way? Were there any things that that simply didn't work no matter how hard you try it and that were difficult to fix before release was ready?
Andrew Palmer: 31:32 Nope. That's, no, he said, sure, sure it is. I'm an amazing developer. I'm gonna regret that. But he's a great developer and you know, he was very focused on it and you know, I had him all to myself for, for the four days in, um, in WordCamp and every time, every night we went back even, you know, two o'clock in the morning after a few, too many gin and tonics, you know, um, you know, had him on the Mac saying, get on with it. It's just, I want this finish now. Um, and he dated and we, and we've always, you know, we, we're also working, we were working on the common love plugin, you know, we bought that off. Uh, my nephew, Andy Bailey, who's unfortunately not very well with multiple sclerosis. So I, you know, I just wanted to, how we could support him in, in the best way. And we're struggling with getting the premium version done for calm love plugins, which Sean is obviously working on as well. Sean and I have been together now 15 years, um, you know, developing stuff, um, working on websites, you know, he really is, he's a proper,
Nathan Wrigley: 32:43 proper programmer, knows his stuff. Is he going to be staying? Is he going to be staying with you throughout the journey of this page builder club? Then is he the man that like your point man for keeping it up to date and adding new features and so on?
Andrew Palmer: 32:55 Oh, he's, he's, he's part of my team. You know, he's part of my development team. You know, we're somebody's hero. We've, we've got a team around us. You know, I've got to mention my guys out in, uh, in, um, India, Srinivas, he's over in the UK at the moment this week. Um, so I'll be seeing him, but he, you know, he's based in, uh, Pakistan, if I've said that correctly or not. Uh, and I've got my hash out in Jaipur who's my lead developer on elegant marketplace. Um, so we've got a nice little tick, you know, dozen people going around. We've got Jenny in, in, um, uh, Bulgaria in Sofia. Uh, we've got, um, other guys in Pakistan that are just a really very capable people. Uh, and we've got some UK developers as well. So, you know, we've got a nice little team here of about a dozen people, um, helping me really, um, living, living the vision.
Andrew Palmer: 33:50 You know, I saw like I say, you know, I'd really like to do this guys, like, okay. And we do and we get it done. So sometimes it seems a bit disparate that there's a couple of things that we could, we could do better. We could certainly design the website better websites better. We could certainly, um, do the branding a little bit separately. You know, we've, we, we've decided we'd pay you to build a cloud with, we're moving that away from, it's a totally separate business from civic tasks. Um, just keeping it separate basically. And you know, we've got Civitas assays. My hope is my limited company in UK, which owns everything basically. Um, so, you know, you've got to separate things out to reward the people that are working on it and working hard on it. So Sean is definitely part of page builder cloud. We'll continue to, to, to be so for ever and a day. You know, as I say, we've been together 15 years, had a little break for a couple of years. Um, but you know, since the inception of elegant marketplace, Sean who's Sean is one of the top vendors on elegant.
Nathan Wrigley: 34:51 Nice as well. So do you, um, with with page builder cloud, are there any sort of interoperability things? So let's say for example, that I, for one reason or another, I've decided to use one page builder over another and I'm, I'm exclusively all in on elementor or beaver builder or what have you. Do I, do I have the option to use any of the page builders that you've mentioned or do I have to sort of say, okay, I'm signing up to page builder cloud as an elementor user or a beaver builder user? Or can you just chuck everything from all of those page builders in all at once?
Andrew Palmer: 35:24 Yes. The only one that you can't have active with all the others is oxygen. So I forgot to mention that. We've got, we've got it. We've done it for oxygen as well because oxygen doesn't takes over the whole theme. Yeah. It will take it, we will discount the other page builders. So you know, if you have a website with Divi elementor, beaver builder, Gutenberg, pootle press site, origin on, you can have all those plugins live and you can save any page to any page builder. Um, so if you're just adamant, so then you've got page builder cloud just for elements. Yup. And it will show you on the dashboard which page builders are actually, um, I'm not sure when somebody showed you. I didn't, I certainly didn't like one of my beats a tested showed it. That's right. Um, you've got a, we can mentioned his name. That was Paul Lacey. Bless. Exactly for Lacey. So I'll, I'll see. I will see you later. Um, said, well, you're allowed to show me. He said, Oh yeah, definitely. So he's 100% allowed to show you. Um, but the, the thing is is that there's a little dashboard that shows you with a green tick to say which page builders are active. Yep. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's not codependent on anything other than having it installed with a page builder. Okay. If you haven't got a page builder, it's still gotten bug.
Nathan Wrigley: 36:45 Yes, yes, of course. Yeah. So here's the, here's the $64,000 question, which these days doesn't seem like a lot of money. Is there interoperability? So what I mean by that is, can I save a, let's say elementor layout and use beaver builder? Crikey. This is when ask and use beaver builder and use that element or layout in beaver builder. In other words, do you have any plans or have you achieved any conversion between the two?
Andrew Palmer: 37:15 Uh, the short answer is not yet. Another short answer is actually beaver builder has that already. Yes. If you like it says convert to beaver builder, but it doesn't put it into the right place. So basically converts the whole page to an html page. Right. There is no reason that, you know, elementor, is html. So you know, there's no reason why you aren't in use Divi to, to um, use that page either. Yeah. But there's a, there's a conversion process and that's about 40% done. Oh Wow. So it's on the road map. Oh, it's definitely on the road. And then we, I mean, what we're going to be working to the first iteration will be any page builders to Gutenberg. Okay. Okay. Because that just seems obvious to us because Gutenberg is going to be the default page builder that's going to be built into WordPress. It's you're not gonna yes, you can put in the, you know, don't use Gutenberg plugging or whatever it is, editor, editor, you can, you can default that. And Divi actually has that built into Divi, um, because they're all going to be issues with, with page builders and Gutenberg, you know, when good bug becomes, and I've got a little store actually, but few ago, a good few months ago when Gutenberg was put into core, one of my clients updated their website's naughty person even though they're on, um, a maintenance contract. They updated WordPress and she wrote me a little note on whatsapp and said, I don't know what you've done.
Nathan Wrigley: 38:55 I'll tell you what, that page builder for posts. That's brilliant. I love it. It's just, Oh, here we go.
Andrew Palmer: 39:06 You know, you've got issues with, you know, say we're going from Divi to Gutenberg, you've got issues of um, a slider or a module. There may not be a block for it. So there's gonna be some guesswork involved. There's going to be some, um, uh, funky things going on. But essentially, yes, that's coming. That's definitely on the roadmap.
Nathan Wrigley: 39:28 Wow, that's incredible. Again, another really cool innovation. I could see that being used all the time. Well now I've said it. Somebody else would do it before us. You know, we don't, we don't, a hundred would let the cat out of the bag. Right. It doesn't matter. I mean, I love innovation.
Andrew Palmer: 39:43 No, I think that if somebody can do it before me,
Nathan Wrigley: 39:48 go and do it. You ain't going to regret that. I really,
Andrew Palmer: 39:51 it honestly, that's the whole point of GPL. You know, it's, if you can do it, then do it. But I know that it's difficult and I've got one of the best, um, PHB PHP guys and service side guys, because the point of page bill, the cloud is, it isn't just PHP. It's, there's a lot of stuff going on on the server. You've got to be able to, you know, import the json Display it, you've got to grab that screen grab, you've got to store it some way. You gotta have categories. So there's a lot of service sites, stuff going on. Um, so it's not just GPL if you like, but an idea is an idea. You know, there are hundreds of thousands of people that make light bulbs. There's hundreds of thousands of people that that might cause. So if there's a different version of page builder cloud coming out, then go for it guys. Because if we are using it in WordPress and WordPress powers, what, 34% of every single website, there's gotta be room for other people to do what we do. Isn't that good point? Well, there's, there's, there's room for Divi elements of beaver builder Gutenberg. There's room for every, everybody.
Nathan Wrigley: 41:05 Yeah. Yeah. It's just, I don't, I don't subscribe to this. Oh, you copied my plugins. That was one of the things that I got for WordCamp Europe was just how massive the whole thing is. You know, when you, especially when you've got, when I walked around the advertising area, you know, the sponsorship area, you realize that boy, you know, to put those stalls together and have the, the, the, the pockets deep enough to, to pay for that space. And it's one of many similar events throughout the world. Uh, it, it amazing. And all those people who made the effort to actually go to a physical space and, you know, pay for their hotels and all that, it brought it home to me. Just how magnificently large this industry is. And you're quite right, you know, dozens of hosting companies, dozens of page builders representing dozens of solutions, all, some of them for tiny, tiny little niches, but able to support the developer or develop a team just because they're using WordPress in it's, it's massive footprint enables that to happen.
Andrew Palmer: 42:06 Well, it tells you that the wellness things, that was quite funny. It was in one of the main halls. You know, there's the woocommerce stand, which is actually now, now, now owned by, um, automatic, automatic Matt and his crew. I'm right next to them is big commerce. Yeah, I guess all that there is, and then, then you, as you walked in, you saw a week, we lots, I think, which the translation plugin next door to them. WPL you've got, do you know one of the facts, one of my favorite plugins is all in one SEO. Um, you know, from Semper Yep. Um, massive amount of plugins have been downloaded, never seen them at WordPress. You Yoast have a massive presence. That's where the investment comes in because Yoast, it costs a lots of money to go. Even with a little stand. It's a good few thousand dollars to have a, a place at word camps because the 40 bucks that you pay for the ticket no way covers your food for three days and entrance fee and your, your free water.
Andrew Palmer: 43:15 You know, the hotel we're charging eight euros for a liter of water yet down the road, you know, literally 20 yards down, you know, you could find a fridge with free water in it. So we know how much these things cost. So we need sponsorships and thank goodness for them. You know, and you had Yost academy there, you had, um, guilt who I used guilt.com which are great for abandoned carts. You know, one of the things that we're always concerned about is why did you add that to the cart and why didn't you buy it? What, what's, what's wrong with you? Or is it our website is our website, you know, so it's always a thing when you're dealing with ecommerce and whether it's, whether it's a physical product like a shirt or a tee shirt, or whether it's a digital product line like we sell.
Andrew Palmer: 43:59 You always wonder why, why did you, what happened? Did the cat come in or did you, did you get interrupted? Or we late for a tea time or what happened? Why didn't you add that to the cart? So guilt.com we're there and they're one of the leaders of a third party sort of, um, almost funnel marketing firm. When you get, you know, you can send a number of emails with we saving the car for you, hit the cart and then here's your, here's your discount because we really do want these to buy from us, that sort of thing. So they're, they're a smaller company if you like. Um, so the, the big companies as well. And how much do, um, automatic spend at WordCamps? Yeah. If they, you know, Woo Commerce Day, you've got, um, jet pack next door to woocommerce slightly, you know, slightly con controversial conversations with them.
Andrew Palmer: 44:48 You know, now you've got to really, to get the best out of Woocommerce, you've got to attack jet pack as well, which is a bit weird. Um, and you know, have they stopped aDiviertising in the dashboard? Who knows? But you know, all those, all those little things that come out of comes and goes, that will, I know, it's just, you see what people don't realize. What I didn't realize. I've now gone, I've been to Boston word can pop into Serbia, which was WordCamp Europe and I've now been to this one in Berlin is how big and contributory the WordPress community is. It's amazing to even be on the periphery. You know, I'd say I was, we were contributes to lie contributors because we've built businesses that help other WordPress developers make some money from what they're developing. Yeah. So that's kind of contributing to it. Um, you know, WP and UP you, you know, you stood in a corner at word camp for four days in a row interviewing people for, you know, the press forward campaign and WP and UP. Yeah. Those are contributors. The sponsorships we all get from hosting companies, from any number of companies that say, you know, I want to help you present your business in a better way. Here's some money to do it. I just think it's, I think it's great.
Nathan Wrigley: 46:11 Yeah. It is an amazing, amazing ecosystem. And like I say, it never fails to amaze me how somebody was such a little niche idea can develop a, a life, a life changing business out of something, which, you know, if you walk down the street and talk to random people about, they, first of all, they wouldn't know what WordPress is, then they wouldn't know what SEO is and then they would definitely have never heard of that little SEO plugin. And yet somebody is making an absolutely, you know, admirable living out of doing it. Um, do you, with your, with your sort of page builder cloud, obviously it's a bit of a new product coming around. Do you, um, are you going to be launching it sort of like with a, like a, I don't know, like a bit of fanfare or you got your pricing all sorted out, any of that stuff that, that would be worth mentioning?
Andrew Palmer: 46:57 I've got, yeah, I've got pricing sorted out for the annual, um, maybe for the annual membership is $55 a year. Nice.
Nathan Wrigley: 47:06 No, really nice. That's really nice. Do you know, that's interesting. I've never heard that number before. Um, it's always 14, 49 or 97 or one nine seven. Where'd you get 55 from? That's intriguing.
Andrew Palmer: 47:19 Well, it's, you know, I thought about it and I thought, I'm fed up of all these nights
Nathan Wrigley: 47:26 [inaudible]
Andrew Palmer: 47:27 and I, and I thought, okay, I need x amount of people to cover the hosting the supports and um, everything else that goes with, you know, maintaining a plugin like this. Uh, and also, you know, putting more page builders in because whatever, whoever comes to us and say, well, you know, I'm using this, Pedro, can we make this, um, compatible so many of those. So we, you know, we've got some r and D to do in there as well. So we, you know, we reckon, um, and number times and number, that's what it's going to cost us. That will cover our costs. 55 bucks a year. It's, I don't even know what that works out to be a day. It's not a lot, is it?
Nathan Wrigley: 48:11 No. Well, I mean, it depends how many, I always, it just strikes me as, because I'm so used to hearing 97 for an annual license. It just strikes me as like a really a fine offer, especially considering what you're doing, which at the end of the day a lot of these plugins are about saving you time, saving you the effort of doing something over and over again or saving you the job of learning something. Well, I can totally see this saving me hours. Absolutely. Hours of rebuilding stuff or exporting, saving and when you've got your conversion process up and running. So I can go from element or to beaver builder or vice versa. That's going to save an awful lot of time and if you know $55 it doesn't, it doesn't stack up too many minutes of development time or you know, time in exchange for money before you've paid for it.
Andrew Palmer: 49:03 No, and that's right. That's why, well let's not forget layouts cloud. You know you get 20 new louts a month for 20 bucks a month, so it's a dollar a month. You get 20 new layouts plus access to the, the archive, which is about 800 plus plus the section layout designer as well, where you can drag across sections and then save those as layouts plus snippets. So you can save, you know, any kind of text in your own cloud. You know, we always, where's, where's that CSS snippet? Where's that bit of Java script? Where's that note that I need to make to a client? You know, I can save it in my cloud. So there's, there's a few things and that's, that's um, if you pay annually, that's $200 a year. Yep. Um, but if you pay monthly, it's 20 $20 a month. So with page builder cloud, we're not actually giving anything other than the ability to store your layouts without giving it free layouts.
Andrew Palmer: 49:55 Yeah, we're not, so there's no maintenance there for us on a monthly basis to say, know payout developers to make layouts for you. It's your doing all the work and all we're doing is providing, you know, a storage facility for that. So, you know, there may be an increase in hosting, but you know to storage, json is no big deal. It's only a text file. So on unlimited storage it's quite easy thing to offer. Um, and also we've been around now for five years is elegant marketplace. We've had massive support from the community. We've had massive support from acuity with layouts are people who use it. Love it, absolutely love it. They just, it saves them so much time they can, they can amend the design that we've given even if the designs aren't 100% there, you know, they are, they're good enough to say, yeah, this is your starting block.
Andrew Palmer: 50:50 And that's where people, you know, where, where Divi and beaver builder and everybody else supplies layouts. You don't want a website out of the box. You want a website that you can amend and you can put your own touch and feel to it and maybe change the colors easily. So these are all starting blocks aren't they just started started, this is how I can start my website because working from a blank canvas, I don't care who you are, you, you can be the most creative person in the world. Um, I've worked at an agency in London once where these guys, it was actually the two guys that came up with, um, Heinz means beans.
Speaker 5: 51:29 Okay.
Andrew Palmer: 51:31 And they did it in an after they came up with an afternoon, it literally came out with it and they were drunk in a pub. I was with them. And they went and, and they, although when, when they told me the story, because they did it in the early seventies and they went just means Heinz means based on it, you know? And that's it. That's how it came about. So there's different levels of creativity and if we, if we can supply you a Lao or Divi or any of the page builders can supply you, allow elementary have done it from day one. Yeah. Yeah. Genius idea, you know, day one, you, you load up elements of the free version. You've got a few layoffs you can choose from. This is, this is how you start. Great in it. You know, it's, it's the week's model. Here's your layout, here's your template.
Andrew Palmer: 52:13 Go for it. Get on with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's where pay places like envato we're going to suffer, you know, the theme developers and stuff, they're going to say, okay, well maybe I'm not going to invest so much time in putting so much into my scene because there are so many different page builders out there and loads on now going to elementor built in. Yeah. Because because it's a WordPress.org plugin, you can download it for free. Um, and you know what, if you don't want the premium items, you can build a very nice website using elementor so that it's, that's the way it's going really built in page builders built in layouts. And if you're not happy with any of the hundreds of thousands of layouts that are out there, save your own to the cloud. And that's, that's the whole,
Nathan Wrigley: 52:57 yeah, I can, I can well see this being an absolute slam dunk with the, especially with the agency model a just seems, you know, if you can, if you can rinse and repeat, then why not, you know, and if you've got somewhere to save it, that you can be operating wherever you are in the world, you'd have to have access to this computer where you save that file and so on. Yeah. Great. Um, so, so, so, so with this, so we're recording this towards the beginning of July. No doubt. By the time this comes out we'll be, uh, we'll be up and running and it will be live and available for purchase. Do you want to give us the URL, not of the, the deal, but the URL of the actual homepage?
Andrew Palmer: 53:37 Yes. Page builder, cloud.com
Nathan Wrigley: 53:40 page. Build a cloud.com. Go check it out. I'm sure there'll be some, you know, some opportunities to buy at linked from that page.
Andrew Palmer: 53:47 But we have, let me you, I just need to be clear on the, on the pricing here because we, everybody needs to be clear on their pricing. The $55 is founder pricing. So if you get in quick, um, then you know, it's $55 a year and it won't go up much from that. But it's basically if you get in now 50 foot, you're, you're, you're locked into the 55 and you may even get a discount as well. When we send you a launch email, you'll, there'll be a little coupon code in there as well because part of my remit in this is to be able to just persuade people how very useful this is for you, whether you're a sole trader, freelance, a bit, slightly bigger agency, large agency to be able to reuse. And like you say, um, I've lost the word that you said, but you know, just reuse your louts across, you know, all the properties that you're developing, um, for that kind of money is just crazy.
Nathan Wrigley: 54:44 Yeah, it's really a really great value. I mean, as you were speaking a minute ago, I was thinking, did I miss him? Was it 55 a month? And then you just said it's 55 annually. I was like, yeah, a few. Uh, I did hear that correctly.
Andrew Palmer: 54:56 No, it's funny. It's 50. The founders offers $55 a year.
Nathan Wrigley: 54:59 That's what I mean. Yeah.
Andrew Palmer: 55:01 It's an probably less than that because you're getting an email with a discount code as well. And I just want to be fair and open and transparent about what it actually means.
Nathan Wrigley: 55:09 Very nice. Uh, Andrew Parma, is there anything you want to say? Twitter handle where you can be found on the internet, all that kind of stuff.
Andrew Palmer: 55:16 Well, you can find a song, a just search elegant marketplace Twitter and that's where we are. Um, it's a misspelling because of Twitter, length of characters. Cause I sent you about that. Um, or you can find me, find me at arnie palmer Dot Com oh, sorry. At Arnie Palmer on Twitter. Uh, and that's from, because I play golf and the, my mates call me Arnold Palmer. My Dad was having a laugh, wasn't even cool.
Nathan Wrigley: 55:43 Yeah.
Andrew Palmer: 55:43 Oh Man. Um, and obviously elegant marketplace and really our Facebook group, um, we lost access to the, to the a Divi theme users group for various business reasons and now elegant themes has that. Um, but the friendliest Facebook group for elegant marketplace is elegant marketplace helping chat. Very cool for, you'll find us in our own Facebook group.
Nathan Wrigley: 56:07 Yeah. Well thanks for building out all these great products on top of page builders, you know, helping, helping the web to be built in an easier way. Do you know, I've just come up with a great strap line for you. I like that. And um, and will no doubt be speaking to you. And I don't know, maybe at some point in the future we'll do webinars where you can show off. It all works, but for now, thanks very much indeed. You're very kind, Nathan. It's such a pleasure. Thank you. Right. That's all we've got for you this week on WP built. I hope that you enjoyed it. Hope you enjoyed listening to Andrew Palmer. Talk about his page, build the cloud and that you can see that this would be very useful for you if you're using a page builder. I want to save your layouts all over the place.
Nathan Wrigley: 56:43 Click on the links in the show notes if you're interested in finding out more. The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by WP and UP one in four of us will be directly affected by mental health related illness, WP and UP supports and promotes positive mental health within the WordPress community. This is achieved through mentorship, events, training and counseling. Please help enable WP and UP by visiting WP and UP .org forward slash give. Okay. Join us next Thursday for a fresh new podcast or come and join us on Monday. First thing in the morning, I released the WordPress weekly news and audio version of my take on the week's news in WordPress and then at two o'clock in the WP Builds Facebook group, two o'clock UK time will be joined live by some notable special guests and we'll talk over that news and it's proving to be very popular. So put that in your diary. 2:00 PM UK time on a Monday is the live version of the news. So maybe we'll see your Monday, maybe Thursday. If not, I hope you have a good week. Bye Bye for now.
