Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP podcast,
Bradley Kirby: [00:00:05] bringing you the latest news from the WordPress community.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:11] Welcome your hosts David Walmsley
Bradley Kirby: [00:00:16] and Nathan Wrigley.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:21] Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. Once again, this is episode number 183. Entitled how I have evolved in my Wallace inline WordPress plugin. It was published on Thursday, the 10th of June, 2020, my name's Nathan Wrigley, and a few bits of housekeeping before we begin, firstly, something new to mention.
I've joined forces with a good friend of mine Sabrina's or Dan, and we are going to launch a brand new lie you've mini series of podcast episodes. And when I say live, that means they're going to be going out in our Facebook group [email protected] forward slash Facebook. Yeah. [email protected] forward slash live.
Now, the intention of this is to launch, like I said, a mini series it's entitled WordPress plugins startup from zero to 10 K installs because Sabrina has launched a new plugin and she's going to be charting over many, many weeks. How it's all gone, what she did well. What she did badly, what she's learned along the way.
And she's going to be sharing that with us, which I think is really, really nice. If you head over to WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook, you'll see that I've pinned this as an announcement at the top of the page. And you can go and get yourself a reminder, but just to say that it's on the 16th of June and the 16th of June is in fact a choose day and it's a 2:00 PM UK time.
So I'd really appreciate it. If you could give me and Sabrina your support by turning up for that, that would be really, really nice. And maybe we'll all learn something along the way. It's not intended as kind of like a masterclass, because we're just learning from Sabrina, what her mistakes were along the way, and maybe.
If you're going to produce a product in the WordPress space, this might be of some interest to you. So join us for that. The other things to mention are WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe over there. You'll be able to join our Facebook group, sign up for our newsletters and find us on your favorite podcast player.
All the usual stuff, head over also to WP Builds.com forward slash deals for a whole bunch of WordPress deals. They're there 365 days of the year, and they never seem to go away. I've had a couple of new ones this week, so go and check that out. And also WP peoples.com forward slash advertise. If you would like to have your product.
It's all service put in front of a WordPress specific audience, a bit like AB split test of Don. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time? Like in a couple of minutes, use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers rows, really anything. And the best part is that it works with element or BeaverBuilder and the WordPress of block editor.
Check it out at absplittest.com. Okay, let's get stuck into the main event. Shall we? This is an interview that I did a few months ago. So a little bit of the content may be out of date. Perhaps Bradley has in fact updated the plugin, but I'm speaking to Bradley Kirby this week, all about how it's been going at Wallace.
Inline Wallace in line is a plugin that you can use to edit just things on the page in light. So the idea is that you click on a title and you end it. You edit it directly there, it started out with something in Beaver builder compatible with Beaver builder only, but recently he's added a whole bunch of new functionality.
So for example, he's got some support for element or he's added in things for Beaver Thema, and he's added in ACF and pods fields. You've got those working as well, but he also talks about how the plugin works, what it does, what it conceals, who it can conceal things from. And if you're interested in making it so that your clients can only modify certain things.
Exactly as they appear on the page, this could well be of interest to you. So I hope that you enjoy the podcast. Hello there. Thank you for getting to the interview. Part of the podcast today, I'm joined by Bradley Kirby. How are you doing Bradley? Good. Good. How are you, Nathan? Yeah, good. We've had Bradley on, I think we've had Bradley on the podcast once and then we've done some, you know, some like webinars and things like that.
Bradley. If you've not come across him before, is a, a product developer. He's a, is a plugin developer for WordPress. It's kind of in the, the page builder space. You may well have heard of something called Wallace in line, but if you haven't. I could explain it, but I'm bound to do a terrible job of it.
So let's hand it over to Bradley and say, hi, Bradley, what does Wallace in line do? Hello?
Bradley Kirby: [00:04:50] So Wallace in line is a client friendly editor for WordPress, and you can kind of think of it as a super minimalist front end editor, specifically for clients to use. and right now it's compatible with Beaver builder and Elementor
Nathan Wrigley: [00:05:04] okay.
Yep. Sorry. I was interrupting you slightly there. What does that exactly mean? What does it add to the competitive world? What is the compatibility that it has to, BeaverBuilder, let's start there.
Bradley Kirby: [00:05:16] So the way I think about it is. If you're an agency or a freelance or making websites for other people, you're using these page builders to design really great pages for your clients, but you don't necessarily want to train them on and give them access to the page builders themselves.
And so that's where walls and Len comes in. it allows them to edit just the content on the sites that you built them with these page builders without giving them access to the page builder itself. So you're able to. Like the client is able to go on to the live site, click the live editor button in the admin bar and then edit the site right there in line.
So there's no separate editing interfaces or separate, like design type features. They can just click on the text, edit the text right there. I click on an image, edit the image and it's. Provides a really nice experience for the clients while still providing that separation of concerns,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:04] for the agency.
so is this Don like on user roles then? So for example, if I'm the administrator of the site and I can have access to absolutely everything, do I assign them a, a particular unique and special kind of Wallace in inline role? Or are they, is it configured for the editor role or contributor or whatever it might be?
Bradley Kirby: [00:06:22] Yeah, it's customizable by role and by user itself. So you would typically assign them, what's called like limited access. And so the limited access
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:31] role,
Bradley Kirby: [00:06:32] it gives you the ability to define on a module by module basis, what they're allowed to edit and what they're not. and then there's also even, you could even get more granular that and, and give a particular user only access to a single page.
so, so there's a highly. Highly granular, highly well-defined how much access or a little access you can give to your, you can give to your clients with people that you want using the product.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:06:56] Okay. So let let's say for example, that you've built a site and I've, had you build that site and you're handing it over to me.
Prior to handing it over. Presumably there'd be some, you know, toing and froing and conversation about what, what, what, what capabilities should you have? You know, do you want to be able to edit everything? That's probably not a good idea. Okay. We'll set you up with some limited capabilities just to make life easy for it.
And actually to be honest, a lot of my clients want exactly that they don't want the ability to break things. They're terrified of the, the tyranny of seeing all the menus. They just want, no, I just want to edit it. Where do, why is the text over there that I want to edit over here? and so on and so forth.
So I would then as your client go to the website, log in with the credentials I'm given, and then I would be looking at the page directly and I would be hovering around trying to get some sort of visual feedback as to the bits that I can edit. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And so what, what are the limitations of their, so let's say for example, I go to a typical home page where I've got a, I don't know, a hero section with a background image.
I might have some large H one text at the top there. And if we scroll down, there might be some more images, some more texts. There might be a video on there. Something along those lines. How, what are the capabilities? Let's say that I want to give them, a whole load of different possibilities. What, what can I kind of lock down on a module by module basis or allow on a module by module basis?
Bradley Kirby: [00:08:22] So you could lock down any individual module that you wanted it even in the individual field that you wanted. And by lockdown, I mean, you, as the admin would go in and click the lock button right there on the interface. And then when the client logged in on their account, They just simply wouldn't be able to hover over that and edited it.
but in terms of content types, if you wanted to give them access, you'd give them access to editing texts. I think images, even editing background images, the only real sort of system wide limitation. And this is more just a product decision is that, the clients don't have access to like editing anything to do with the design.
And so if they wanted to make some text bigger or smaller, that's not something that's offered right now. Or if they wanted to like change colors and stuff. That's not offered right now. the idea there is that that's your job of the designer is to, as the website builder is to define the design.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:13] Yeah.
I mean, I can see this being really extremely useful just from the point of view of not having to do not having to deal with catastrophic mess ups that come back to you. You know, what I'm meaning is you've handed it over to the client. You've, you know, they've definitely requested administrative permissions.
You've somehow, somehow been coerced into giving them that. And the site is launched in two weeks later, you go to look at it and you realize everything is wrong. They've adjusted the font size. They've adjusted the text. they've adjusted the padding and the margins. The image that you saw carefully cropped has now been ruined by some other abomination and so on.
So this just strips away, all that pain you, as part of the process of building out a page, you add an additional step, presumably right at the end, before you're finished going in and. Locking everything down or can you do it the other way around? Can you just sort of like lock everything down and then go and unlock just the bits that you want?
Bradley Kirby: [00:10:10] I don't think there's way right now to, by default lock everything down. But, but I don't think also that it would be that common of a, of a scenario to eat locking down so much of the site.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:20] Yeah. Cause
Bradley Kirby: [00:10:22] it's, it's so fundamentally built for, for content only anyway, that it's sort of, sort of like that already, that just by virtue of the fact that you're not giving them access to the page builder, all those design elements are locked down.
And like you're saying, I definitely think it cuts down on, the instances of like, besides getting messed up and instances of support requests, for like three clients we're giving you. it's not that surprising to me that. If you give someone a powerful tool that they're going to want to use those powerful features.
Right. So I think, I think being able to set the context of like, what is, The most common and the most useful things to edit versus what's not. And then of course, if there's a design type element that they disagree with it that they want to talk to you about it, you're still just an email away. So it's not like there's things are locked down forever, but this gives, this sets the context in that like, okay, this is what, on a day to day basis, you're going to be editing.
and. And then the other stuff is out of sight out of mind.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:11:17] Do you, do you typically find that people that use your plugin, use it simply? Well, let's put it this way. They kind of conceal the fact that there was ever a page builder there at all and they just introduce it to the client is, look, this is, this is the editing experience that, that you're going to have.
And there's no mention that actually we could, if we really wanted to give you considerable. you know, you could give you much more power if you so chose. I can see myself deploying it that way, just when I make the videos to explain how the site works and what have you just log in as them. And then pretend like that's all that they've were, would ever have been allowed to do anyway.
Bradley Kirby: [00:11:52] Yeah, that's exactly right. And a lot of my customers do do that. A common, common sort of other customization to do along with Wallace and mine is editing the, the admin bar so that the, the page builders, they, that they're disappeared. So they don't even have the idea of access of a page builder.
And then this often goes along with like, tense, white labeling of the, the back end dashboard, if they're even allowed access to the backend dashboard or been given access. And so I think that's, that's actually a very common use case.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:24] Does Wallace in line do any of that heavy lifting of, you know, removing the, the little Beaver builder or element or, editing options in the admin area?
Do you, do you provide that functionality of, you gotta got to figure out another work around for that?
Bradley Kirby: [00:12:37] No, it doesn't yet would have to do some custom work on their own. But I think there are lots of other simple plugins that you can achieve
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:44] that with. So what's the, what's the cue that you see on the page.
So again, let's pretend that I'm the logged in user. Who's got limited access as I'm, as I've logged in and I'm rolling my mouse around. What are the, what are the cues that alert me to the fact that there's something over here? Is it like a. Like a little rectangle, which goes over some text or a call guy call or a little wrench or whatever it might be.
Bradley Kirby: [00:13:09] Yeah. So it is a, just a dotted blue border around the editable, around the editable, text and images. And then once you hover over that, that dotted blue border becomes a solid blue border. And then, once you click in it, you're obviously given a cursor icon or you're given a, Edit button in the case of images.
and so that I can guide you through the process of editing the content.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:33] And what about, an image then? How would I, so, I mean, the Curtis is a bit of a giveaway, isn't it? You get the flashing line and I'll look here. I can type on the keyboard and, and things, you know, I can type in text and remove texts.
And what have you, what about images and background images and so on? How, how do you, how do you display that? There's an image to be altered.
Bradley Kirby: [00:13:51] So images are pretty straightforward. They're like texts, there's a dot of blue border around the image. And so you'll click that and then the image will highlight itself and give you an edit button.
And then once you click the edit button, the a, the typical WordPress media library will open up and allow you to select an image that you've already uploaded or the quarter upload a new image. Once you selected that, it'll display. In line display, where it will display on the live site. And then, and then background images are pretty interesting because.
Background images. The way I think about it is there's always going to be some amount of texts on front, in front of the background image, and you don't know where exactly that's going to be. So when I was designing the interface for editing background and just, I was like, well, you can't guarantee that whatever a button you're going to put there, there's going to be interactable.
So the way I did it was a sort of. I call it like a contextual menu item will pop up in the live editor toolbar at the bottom left. where if you click on text, that's above a background image, there'll be a new button that pops up in the live editor toolbar that will allow you to then edit that background image.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:04] and then presumably the fact that all of this, you know, you've got limited array of possible editing options. It takes your time to explain the page builder and all of its, you know, all of its little intricacies almost to zero, you could re you know, create a video, hover the mouse around a little bit, say click here, type, you know, and here's how you edit images and you're done and probably have that whole process sealed within a minute.
Bradley Kirby: [00:15:30] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's a very, very intuitive, the goal for me building this product was to put as little interface as possible between the user and the live site. Okay. So it's just the bare necessities of selecting and saving, and publishing that that are actually expressed and everything else is right there in the live site.
And there's no separate, there's no separate. No URL, like there is for a builder. There's no separate page loads. You're literally loading the live site and just clicking a little, live editor button in the top bar. And then you're getting a little toolbar and then everything else is right there on the website.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:04] It kind of feels to me that when, when I hand over a site, which has got, Lauren text, I feel a bit nervous about that. Because that immediately requires the user to kind of, you know, log in and explore all the different options and, you know, pops BeaverBuilder and suddenly all those menus are there all, look, if I did this, I could change its font size and I could change its color or what have you.
It feels to me that you could, you you'd be far more likely to, to wish to handle a site full of Laura. I'm over with this. Set up because you can just say what you can just write whatever text you want in there. That's the gap that it's going to go in and you know that they're not going to go off exploring ways to break it.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Bradley Kirby: [00:16:44] That sounds good. It's kind of a it's painting in the lines. It's like filling in the blanks, because they're not creating new modules and they're not deleting them. So you're sitting at the layout and like you said, you put in the placeholder images, the placeholder text, and then they, as the clients are best positioned to, to write that copy or to, or to hand that off to a copywriter that they might have
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:04] in order to write
Bradley Kirby: [00:17:05] that copy.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:05] So, I guess one of the questions that would be asked is, you know, so we can do. Presumably we can do regular WordPress posts and pages. That'll all work just out of the box, but increasingly, you know, WordPress is becoming the, the playground for more sophisticated solutions, you know, advanced custom fields and things like that.
So the content that you see on the page is the product of a field, which is in some random custom posts. And what have you, are there any, are there any kind of integrations with those kinds of products, custom field creation tools?
Bradley Kirby: [00:17:39] Yes. So if you're a BeaverBuilder and Beaver theme or customer a I've just recently come out with, advanced custom fields and also pod support, which is a similar solution to, custom fields.
And so if you're creating custom fields through Beaver theme or all of those versus editable, the same way with Wallace and line. And so from a user perspective, what's neat about that is again like the, the underlying technology is completely hidden for them. It's just a piece of text. It doesn't matter that it's a custom field.
and they're able to edit it like any other piece of text and that's, that's the main, I'm kind of the Holy grail with this product and what I'm working towards every day is that kind of unified editing experience, where you, as the designer, developer are using all of these sophisticated tools, custom fields and, and page builders and, and page templates and layouts and so forth to build a really nice.
A dynamic site. And then all of that is unified by Wallace line for a simple editing interface,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:36] for the clients, I guess, I guess the follow up question to that would be then let's say for example, I've created a custom post type or I don't know of, shoes. And in there are images of shoes and there's custom fields, listing things like a description of the shoe and the size of the shoe.
And what have you, you know, all the different things that shoes can have. And I've created a Beaver theme, a layout, which is basically just like a templating system. It allows me to create a page for the shoe content type and arrange, okay. The picture for all shoes will go over there. The title for all shoes, we'll go over there.
And then when you, when you load up a page for a particular shoe, it looks just like that. So when I'm logged in as the user that I'm pretending to be, and I go to, I don't know, the, this, this particular shoe and change the, the title of it or change some. Fake text. Are you somehow sort of squirreling that data away in a different table somewhere?
I'm writing it over the top and deleting the, or are you, are you literally customizing, editing the ACF field, in the custom post type?
Bradley Kirby: [00:19:44] Is the, the custom field itself, but there's no separate like mirror or anything like
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:49] that. Okay. There's no disguising. So I suppose that, that might be an interesting thing, which might rear its head with the clients.
You know, let's say for example, that you've deployed. That was a bad example shoes. Now I'm thinking about, I don't know, something like testimonials might be a better one and you could have those testimonials appearing. Yeah. In multiple different places on websites, you know? And, and I can imagine that if, you know, you could do some sort of filter so that it presents a random one on this particular page, and it shows the third testimony on this particular page.
I suppose you've got to be a bit mindful and educate the users about that. Okay. You're editing it over here, but just be careful because that means it's also going to be spitting out a different one over there. You know, it's not just that the page is static. Yep.
Bradley Kirby: [00:20:34] Yeah, exactly. With, with great power comes.
Great responsibility in that regard, I think.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:38] Yeah. And, but I guess, you know, I guess, I guess that's just how it is. So you've got, through Beaver Thema, you can use ACF and pods. have you got any more sort of like roadmap features that you're thinking about integrating into the BeaverBuilder stack at the moment?
Bradley Kirby: [00:20:52] Beaver builder, I think is looking pretty good right now in terms of the breadth of support. So right now, you know, Global fields are editable. You have beavers steamer, headers, footers, reputable. You have the advanced custom field stuff is editable through Beaver theme or background fields or background images are editable icons reputable.
So I feel actually pretty good about where Beaver builder is right now in terms of, in terms of expanding integration. Right now, I'm focusing on element door. I want to get the element to theme builder stuff online, which is not online yet. and increasing like a third party support for element or
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:28] okay.
Yeah, can I come to elementary? Just one second. I just want to ask you one final Beaver builder related question. And that is, that is the one about the, you just mentioned global, global areas. So in BeaverBuilder traditionally, if you go over and edit something, you get this blue, as you described this blue kind of rectangle, which appears, and if it's a global row or.
What have you, it's I'm going to say orange. I'm not sure whether it's orange or not, but it kind of looks orange. That is orange. Do you adopt that same notion? So you could tell a client, right? This is used elsewhere, likely because it's orange or do you in some way indicate that, visually. I
Bradley Kirby: [00:22:07] actually don't right now, but that is, I should do that.
And I think a previous version of Wells and I did it, did do that, but for some reason I had a disabled it, but, but I think that's going to be making a return because you're right. Any, any sort of dynamic module, where we're texts in one place as it should, is going to be, represented somewhere else.
Yeah, there definitely should be a, a UI type. indication for that. So they'll be making a return for sure.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:32] Yeah. I mean, it's just more of a like, Ooh, It's orange. Okay. Be careful. Where else is this use? I mean, you don't need to know particularly where it, where else it's used. Hopefully if you're a frequent user of your own website and you're modifying it periodically, you'll have some indication of where else it's being used.
It might not be being used elsewhere, but there you go. Okay. That's great. Thank you. So Ella mentor. You, you obviously chose to go with Beaver builder and build it out. And you've got all of these great features, Thema, ACF, and pods. Where are you at on the element or journey obviously, in terms of like user base, Ella mentor is now, I don't know how many times bigger, but it certainly seems to have a significantly larger audience.
So seems like a sensible option to head over there. Where are you in terms of the, the feature parity?
Bradley Kirby: [00:23:19] So. So there's support for all modules, all basic text and image modules, both in the free version and in the pro version. And so that's where I'm at right now. And then as well as a few, third party supports, for the third party elements.
but I built out the infrastructure such that it's very
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:38] quick to
Bradley Kirby: [00:23:39] introduce more third party. A module support. It's just a pretty simple configuration file that I can update. and so some actively working on expanding that their part is portfolio mentor, as well as looking at the, the theme builder, in L mentor to provide the same sort of, dynamic capabilities.
That exists on Beaver builder today.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:23:58] Just interested in the architecture of both of these come comparatively, you know, side by side. Were there any kind of interesting things that w that you achieved in Beaver builder and, you know, you begin with a nice, fresh install of element or for the first time, however many months ago that was, and you thought, right.
Okay. Let's crack on with this. And suddenly you hit a roadblock because something about the way it's been architected is different. I'm sure. Surely you probably got lots of stories like that.
Bradley Kirby: [00:24:25] Yeah, that's something. I was pretty scared of, when I was embarking on the, on the journey support or mentor, but it turned out that, the architectures are, were similar enough, that I didn't have to substantially rewrite Walston line.
And actually
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:39] about a
Bradley Kirby: [00:24:39] year ago now, maybe nine months, I completely rewrote, all of the architecture of walls in line in order to be able to do this sort of thing. So I took an early look at elementary, even back then. And it was like, Yeah, can I, can I use this same approach and the answer ended up being no.
And so, and it needed to back then it kind of needed to be reverted in any way. Software kind of has a shorter shelf life where at least as the developer, you're like, Ugh, this is not working. I need to just start from scratch. And so I ended up doing that. and as a result of that, the infrastructure now is like, is way more, applicable to.
To be able to support different page builders, and including, including Gutenberg, native WordPress builder, going forward, it still requires a significant amount of work, but it's not so much work that it's like building a whole new plugin.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:27] Yeah. It feels to me. And you've probably got a really good insight into this.
it feels to me as if. very frequently. We're seeing significant amount of, PR from element or in terms of, you know, features that they've added. I can think of maybe half a dozen things that I've seen over the last six months, whereas Beaver builder seems to be much more steady away, you know, they're, they're sort of.
Staying on the path they're working. Well, I don't, I don't know what the purpose of specifically for that is, but you know, that there's less in terms of media and what have you. And so it kind of raises the question with elemental iterating so quickly. did, has that, do they rearchitect things massively or has that period?
Cause I know at the beginning. I found the mentors journey. There were a few, few discussions about the fact that that introduced a feature and it may cause problems down the road. But my understanding is those days are kind of long gone.
Bradley Kirby: [00:26:23] Yeah. In my experience, they're not really changing the fundamentals, the fundamental technical architecture of the, of the plugin anymore.
So yeah, but you're definitely right. That they're iterating, iterating very quickly. Up the stack, if you want to call it that way. in terms of like the, the amount of like design features that they're bringing in and the stuff that they're doing with like sections and like background images, and stuff like that.
but none of that stuff affects. The kind of the day to day that I'm interacting with their software with
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:53] the plugin itself, do we have to, do we have to purchase the plugin in the Elementor version and the Beaver builder version separately? Or do we just download one plugin and, and, you know, throw it up either of those two page builders and it'll all be good.
Bradley Kirby: [00:27:10] Nope. Just one purchase for all, all a page builders.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:14] Oh, interesting. So it, you know what, whatever state it's at with elemental, that's where it's at and whatever States that would BeaverBuilder, that's where it's at, but you don't need to go and find the sort of element or add on or the Beaver builder add on or anything.
Just, just the bare bones, Wallace, inline plugin.
Bradley Kirby: [00:27:31] Yep. That's exactly right. Yeah. I kind of, that kind of goes along with my vision for it as a, as a unified interface where it doesn't make much sense. I don't think to, to kind of. Separate out the, the, the plugin in that way. I want it to just integrate with whatever you're using to build sites for your clients, and if it to just work and for you to be able to change those things,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:27:53] interesting model, especially sort of from a pricing point of view.
Cause I suppose you could have approached that entirely differently. You know, here is something quite separate. elemental support is new. It's something that was never in the Beaver builder version. So I'm going to, I'm going to put it out there and charge separately, so, wow. Okay. That's great. So if you've got a copy, if you've historically had a copy, you've basically just inherited the, the capability to stick it in elemental sites as well.
That's great. Yeah,
Bradley Kirby: [00:28:21] that's right.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:21] Wow. That was a courageous decision. But I suppose I'm looking at it from your point of view, it was also quite a sensible decision because you'll bring over the existing users who hopefully will, you know, if, if they migrated from Beaver builder and have started using element or, or vice versa, they'll, there'll be, you know, satisfied and talking about it and raving about it.
And what have you.
Bradley Kirby: [00:28:41] Yeah, absolutely. M selling and a half sold lifetime licenses in the past. So it feels like that's like, that's the best thing to do with your selling lifetime licenses is you're short of selling your future work as well. So kind of it kind of a my rub people, the wrong way, a little bit for them to.
For them to not get, you know what I'm coming out. What's next?
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:03] Yeah. Fair enough. Well, speaking of pricing, let's have a quick look at that. So if you go over to Wallace, inline.com. So just to spell that out, w a double L a C E inline.com. You'll I'm currently the day of recording this. You've got three pricing options.
Do you want to just run through what the, what the three options are and what you can achieve by spending a bit more? Yeah,
Bradley Kirby: [00:29:26] the three present tears right now are three sites for $49 a year. And the limited number of sites for $99 a year. And then lifetime unlimited sites for $249 for a one time purchase.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:39] Okay. And, so yeah, 49 99 or two, four nine. And let me just get that right. What was the, so, Oh, okay. Three sites was the 49 option. And then if you buy the. The higher too, you can put it on, on limited sites. So $99 per year on limited number of sites equally with the lifetime purchase. But if you, if you like it, it kind of makes sense to me a hook, you know, when you're on your second year, when you're on your first renewal, it kind of feels like, you know, if you're still enjoying it and what have you, it makes sense at that point, maybe two, two.
Hop over to the lifetime. Happy with the lifetime. You still feeling that's a good option. I know that there's a lot of discussion about whether there's this sort of sustainability problems with lifetime options.
Bradley Kirby: [00:30:22] Yeah, there is a lot of discussion on that, but from what I've found, I've found I've been in business two years now with this, and I found the lifetime option to be, sustainable in that the, when it compared to the amount of support requests I'm getting versus the revenue that I get, then I think it is sustainable, but, but it's certainly possible that the lifetime option, What either increase in price or go away in the future.
So
Nathan Wrigley: [00:30:43] I remember seeing an article it's very recently, actually it was, Elliot Condon from, from ACF and he put together this little table where he showed he's been going for, I think he's probably going for maybe five years or something. Now it might even be a little bit longer. And he shows that year on year, he's had, the sales have gone up by like 10%.
So the sales that this little bar gets a little bit bigger, but the combined number of customers that, that means, and the support tickets each year at some point, it, it tipped the balance. And for him, coming up very soon, if not already. He's going to, he's going to drop his, lifetime pricing and just head over to, you know, regular pricing, of a yearly subscription.
But yeah, w we'll see, hopefully if you're still listening to this and the year is 2022, you never know it might still be there. Go check it out. How about Gothenburg then? What do you feel about this whole project? Where again, at the time of recording it, we're roughly a year. Since, Gothenburg dropped, obviously, you know, it has pretensions of being a page builder, although it doesn't try to be all things to all people.
What, what do you make of it?
Bradley Kirby: [00:31:48] I think it's a really good thing for WordPress overall. I think, it had sort of a Rocky beginning and I think it was no matter what it was always going to have a bit of a Rocky start just because. People are just so persnickety about their technology and the fact that, Oh, you know, big, bad automatics coming in Aaron and dictating to us what we should be doing.
but I think overall it was both necessary for the project. And I think it's going to be, a really good thing. one of the interesting parts about what Matt said at the latest word camp, U S was that he said it was 20% done. And so you see the, the. Pretty like pretty massive changes over the past year for Gutenberg in, and you hear it from the, when the guy leading it and it's only 20% done.
I think that tells you like the amount of, sort of institutional capital that he's put behind this thing and it's going to continue to put behind it. So I think that, I sort of think maybe this is too, too diverse statement, but I sort of think good feeling that if Gutenberg fails, then WordPress itself.
What fail. And so I don't, I don't consider that to be something that's going to happen.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:53] No. Do you, do you feel that it's a direction that you're going to move into because obviously, you know, the, the, the, the, how to describe it, the difficult, although the page builder made so many things much, much more easy, your, your PR your prime emotive, I suppose, is.
Even that's too difficult for a nontechnical user. So let's just strip away all the things which a client can mess and create this Wallace in line plugin, which just makes it super simple to edit the very basics of what you need to edit. now it feels to me as if the, the block editor is we should probably be calling it is, is kind of re-introducing that stuff, you know, we've got, loads of options.
People are starting to invent all sorts of blocks with an infinite array of options. And what have you, do you see yourself? Going towards Guttenberg and creating Wallace in line for Guttenberg. And what I mean by that is again, just, just removing all the editor options, removing the ability to, I don't know, change the font, change the font size, change, the size of the image, change the position, all of that stuff.
Stripping it away. Just like you've done with Elementor and Beaver builder.
Bradley Kirby: [00:33:58] Yeah, absolutely. That's probably going to be the next, the next page builder that I support. And like I said, I do consider it to be a page builder the same way that'd be verbal or element or is. and yeah, so I think that if you're making a plugin or, or God help you have a theme today and in the, the WordPress marketplace that you're going to have to contend very strongly with Gutenberg, sooner rather than later, I think.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:20] Yeah. It's interesting. You said that, you've obviously got concerns about themes. Do you, do you sort of see the, You see the theme era as slowly, but surely coming to a close. I,
Bradley Kirby: [00:34:30] I think it's, it's very quickly coming to a close that hasn't already. Yeah, I don't, I, I don't really see the place for themes.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:34:40] Yeah. And for those of us who don't understand that rationale, who were just, you know, I've used L I'm sorry, I've used WordPress for ever and a day, and we've always had a theme. There's always been a need for it. In fact, you must have a theme. It's more than, you know, it's kind of like a nice thing to have.
Do you want to just explain your reasoning? Cause it, cause it is interesting. Well, I think
Bradley Kirby: [00:34:59] actually in the very, very early days of WordPress, there weren't things, there was just one, the one thing to roll them all. And I think we'll have a kind of return to that just because historically speaking, that theme has been, has been there to define the look of the site.
And the, and the block editor and page builders in general, that's also what they do. And so you can't really have them both be dominant. and I think you've seen the importance of themes in the, in the page builder ecosystem. Decrease in importance over time. And at least from my perspective, what I've been saying is that the most in demand themes, if you're using a page builder, are the teams that do the least, it's like, what's the most lightweight theme that does as little as possible, what I want.
And I think eventually that just becomes, well, you know, let's just not use a anymore. I think one of the page builders, I don't remember which one does, maybe you do. It doesn't require thing.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:52] Yeah. It's oxygen, oxygen. Yeah. It completely completely hijacks the whole sort of theme architecture. And, and for that reason it does things in a very different way.
yeah, it's, it's absolutely fascinating. And it is interesting. I sort of share your sentiments. I don't know how long this is going to last or in the same way that we, We a year ago, we were sort of, Oh, goodness me, page builders. They're on the way out. There's Guttenberg who knows what this is going to present, you know, theme, theme builders, people who have traditionally been fabulous at creating themes.
no doubt. There'll be a, an interesting pivot to be done whereby you, you become an expert in, building the blocks, which ostensibly do the same thing as your theme ever did. And having all of those blocks that now are the theme available for sale instead of like the theme itself. Yeah, I
Bradley Kirby: [00:36:40] think there'll be a, there'll be templates.
So it'd be not even individual blocks away the way I think it maps is like plugins become individual blocks or sets of blocks. And then the themes become the page templates that you arrange them in. So if you're a skilled designer, there will still absolutely be a place for you selling those templates, because those are going to be in very high demand, everyone.
unless you're a skilled designer yourself, we'll be looking to at least start their sites from the template.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:37:06] Yeah, that seems to be the direction of travel. You know, you only have to look at loads and loads of template packs that have suddenly become available with really nice design. And, and in some cases, trying to mimic that, that kind of, the stripped down theme that you were talking about, the super lightweight theme, you know, it's basically just a wire frame with some, just some, just some hint as to where things could go.
And then the idea is you'd go into your page builder and build out all the colors and the fonts yourself. but then also lots of interesting products coming around. In order to kind of save those templates elsewhere so that you can speed up the flow of your, your website even more quickly. One thing that comes to mind is, page builder, cloud.
I don't know if you've come across that product, but it's, it's sent you essentially, you put a plugin into your website and from that moment on you sync it to your own. Cloud. So you've got a website somewhere, which you've dedicated to be the repository of all of your saved rows and modules. And what have you, you installed like the child plugin.
I'm probably not doing this justice, but, and then from that moment on you can, every new site that you cook that you create, you can just quickly with one button sock in all the templates that you've ever made before and saved away. I mean, it's just. Remarkably easy to do. And, you know, it takes seconds to build a, build a site from things that you've already created.
And I can see that becoming a bit of a thing as well, you know, online repositories of blocks. And what have you, you just sort of download big packs of them anyway. Yeah. Interesting, interesting stuff. Sadly we're out of time, Bradley, I'm going to have to, I'm gonna have to sort of knock it on the head as I say, but before we, before we do that, do you want to, do you wanna tell us anything about where we can find you, Twitter handle URLs that you want to mention and so on?
Bradley Kirby: [00:38:51] Yeah, I'm on Twitter, Brandy underscore Kirby, and then definitely check out Wallace in line.com. If you're making a sites for clients and you're using Beaver builder. Elementor.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:00] Thank you very much, indeed. Thanks for coming on the show today, Bradley.
Bradley Kirby: [00:39:04] Thanks so much,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:07] right? That's it. I hope that you enjoyed the podcast this week.
It was very pleasurable chatting to Bradley. Like I say, it was a little bit of time ago that we recorded that podcast episode. So perhaps the odd thing has changed. You can certainly hook up with him in the Facebook group. WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook. I know he's in there and you could ask him if anything has changed in the, in the time since we recorded it.
Anyway, I hope that you found it useful and interesting. The WP Builds podcast was brought to you today by AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split tests in record time or the new AB split test plugin for WordPress? We'll have your pan running in a couple of minutes. Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else.
Buttons, images, headers rows, really anything. And the best part it works with element or BeaverBuilder and the WordPress block editor. You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay. We produce a lot of content. We'll certainly be back this time next week. So that's a Thursday for the podcast episode.
However, remember that we produce a news episode on a Monday. And we also do a live version of the news 2:00 PM, UK time, every single Monday. And as I said at the top of the show, join me and Sabrina on the 16th, Tuesday, the 16th of June, 2020 2:00 PM. UK time. When we begin, we embark upon our WordPress plugin startup from zero to 10 K installs mini series.
I think that'll be really enjoyable and something, something a bit fresh and interesting. Okay. Nothing more for me to say, except I'm going to fade in some cheesy music and say, bye bye for now. .
