Nathan Wrigley: [00:00:00] Welcome to the WP Builds podcast, bringing you the latest news. He's from the WordPress community. Welcome your host, David Waumsley, and Nathan Wrigley.
Hello there and welcome to the WP Builds podcast. This is episode number 197 and titled multiple domains. One WordPress install. You need London kit. It was published on Thursday, the 17th of September, 2020, my name's Nathan Wrigley and the usual housekeeping just before we begin, if you wouldn't mind going over to WP Builds.com.
That's our website where we keep all of our WordPress content and we produce quite a lot of WordPress content each week. You're listening to the Thursday podcast and on a Monday we produced the WP Builds weekly WordPress news. It's about half an hour of me telling you what I think is important in the WordPress world.
From the previous seven days, 2:00 PM, UK time. Every Monday we have the WP Builds live version of that news where we go through it. But with some notable WordPress guests, you can join [email protected] forward slash live for that, or WP Builds.com forward slash Facebook, which is our Facebook group. And we post it there as well.
And you are welcome to join in with the comments. It's very nice when people do. WP Builds.com forward slash subscribe is the way that you can keep in touch with us. Join that Facebook group. Join our email newsletter list and also join a list where we'll tell you if we hear about WordPress deals and on that page, you can subscribe to us on your favorite podcast player.
WP Builds.com forward slash jobs. If you would like to insert a job into the news that we put out on a Monday, I will do that. And it's completely free. And WP Builds.com forward slash advertise. If you would like to have your product or service put in front of a WordPress specific audience a bit like these guys, the WP builder podcast was brought to you today by the page builder summit.
Do you use a page builder to create your WordPress sites, or perhaps you're curious about what they can do, whether it's element or BeaverBuilder Guttenberg breezy oxygen or any of the page builders. The page builder summit will have something for you. It's running from the fifth to the 9th of October, and you can check out the amazing speaker list and get your free [email protected], which is a URL summit.camp and AB split test.
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, how does Rose anything? The best part is that it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. Check it [email protected].
Okie dokie. As I said, lots of content coming your way this week, you can check that out, but more importantly, what's going on this week. today I speak with Jason Schuler about his fabulous plugin called WP London kit. Now this is just something that I think ought to have been around for ages. It's got a really specific use case and I feel it's really going to be useful to internet marketers.
The idea is that rather than have multiple domains for your one page landing, Page sites, you put them all into one WordPress install, which is easy to maintain and update. And then you point the DNS at the plugin and the plugin deals with serving up those pages. So if you go to example.com, it will point to your landing page on your WordPress website.
And if you point to example, two.com, it will point to a different page. And so it makes it easy to create templates, keep things updated and so on. Really genius idea, love the plugin from a very respectable work. Press developer and you can find out about it right now. I hope that you enjoy it. Hello.
Thank you for getting to the interview. Part of the podcast today, I'm joined from Seattle. I've just learnt Jason Schuler. Have I pronounced that right, Jason? Schuler.
Jason Schuller: [00:04:06] Yes, you got it pretty much on the nose.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:08] Okay. Jason actually in my WordPress journey, Jason goes back a long way because when I was first dabbling with CMS is I was really torn between Drupal and WordPress.
And for a little bit of time, I played with WordPress and actually used one of Jason's. Premium themes. he had a theme shop called press 75, and I purchased one of those and then played with that for a little bit of time, then went to Drupal, came back to WordPress. So Jason, you are largely responsible for the fact that I now use WordPress.
Jason Schuller: [00:04:42] Oh man. you're putting the pressure on me
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:44] that
Jason Schuller: [00:04:45] we'll do it. Cause I went down that same path of, playing around with Drupal and getting into that whole scene and themes. And it was just way too complex for me. So that's what led me to WordPress.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:04:55] Yeah, it's a lot easier on work.
Pressed to do that kind of thing. Let's say. so what is your journey with WordPress? Have you been using it? obviously you've been using it for longer than I have cause you've been having products that I bought. But how long ago did you begin, have you stepped in, stepped out, stepped in again?
How does it work?
Jason Schuller: [00:05:12] Yeah, I was working for the Boeing company here in Seattle. It's where I taught myself web design and development. And honestly, I was just looking for a solution that helped them manage their internal website infrastructure. Cause it was all managed by static, HTML. And that's kinda what led me down in 2007, the path of Drupal and Joomla and then WordPress and trying to figure out how I could solve that problem of managing an internal network of websites, and save them a little money.
I came up with this huge presentation for them and they loved it and I'm like, I could literally save you guys millions of dollars a year. Wow. if I were to put this on, a network install and create a theme for you, cause all their internal websites look the same and they were like, it's cool.
But, it's open source software, which they were not into at the time. And so that was kinda my cue to really just. Think about leaving the company and going off on my own. Cause I saw so much potential in what we're press was doing and I loved what the community was about at that time. And. And that's when I branched off on my own and just started experimenting with themes and plugins, which led to a premium WordPress theme business in 2008.
Okay. ran that all the way through 2014, got a little bit burnt out, sold the business, went to work for a plateau with drew Wilson. Awesome little startup, which eventually sold the GoDaddy. And that brings me back to WordPress as I started experimenting and, wanting to maybe jump into the plugin space and carve out a few ideas and see what.
the ecosystem is like these days and what I found it's stronger than ever. So yeah,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:07:00] it really is. It's growing at a heck of a rate. It feels to me like it's just the sort of dominant platform for the next period of time. So that's why I've settled my horse to this particular cart for such a long period of time.
And, yeah, so we're on today. We're going to talk about a plugin that you've had out for, just a matter of weeks now. it's called. it's called WP landing kit. And as you'd imagine, the.com is WP landing, kit.com. there's no spaces or hyphens or anything like that. So maybe during the course of the, this podcast, if anything that you say that we say is confusing, just pause, go and have a look at that page.
It's basically all presented on three or four pages and you can see everything it does. And it does one particular thing really well now. Before we start that's I applaud you. Bravo. One thing. is my ideal plugin. I love those kinds of plugins, so that's great. But yeah. What is the point of WP landing kit?
What sits raise on Dettra. Why does it exist? What's it trying to fix?
Jason Schuller: [00:08:00] It was a mistake plugin, to be honest, I have this little sass startup that I built using WordPress called leaflets. And what leaflets was about is just to see if I could build a landing page generator using WordPress, but.
Not have users actually see WordPress. and so I created all these little templates, page templates for WordPress and created this really nice front end that allows you to generate a page, and actually edit the page and publish the page without ever seeing WordPress. and it was just like a one off publish of 25 bucks, with no recurring fees.
But in order to accomplish that, I needed a way to hook. Those pages up to custom domains. Cause they, anybody who publishes a website, they're going to want to hook it up to a custom domain. I didn't want to use multisite cause it was just way too complex for what I want to accomplish. and that's okay.
Kind of what led to the idea of landing kit? what if, I don't know, what if, other WordPress users out there would want that functionality for their singular WordPress installs? And so it just led to a tweet. I created this functionality, it exists. Not in the form of a plugin, but in way of functionality that I created for this other SAS.
but would you be interested in it in the form of a plugin and the response was overwhelmingly? Yes. And that's what led the landing. Okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:21] So it's actually part of the, so the code and the functionality, and most of the Gubbins of it is actually built into leaflets, which as you say, is your sort of sass.
Product. I'm sorry. I forgot to mention that. That would have been, that would have been a useful thing too, for me to have set at the top, but, the functionality is in there and you just stripped it out, wrapped it up in a plugin and there we are. Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Schuller: [00:09:40] It's not, it wasn't quite as simple as
Nathan Wrigley: [00:09:43] forgive me.
Jason Schuller: [00:09:44] I knew that I wanted to, I'd never built a premium. And WordPress plugin before, and I knew I wanted to do it. being a maker myself, I, all design and make anything, however I can, but I really wanted this to be something. that was done right from the start. And that's why I reached out to the Twitter world again and asked if there were any, existing developers out there who are in that space who wanted to partner with me and take the idea of that functionality and build it into a premium plugin that the right way.
And that's what led me to Phil Kurth, and Australian based. Fella who is running his own plugin business hook turn. And he reached out immediately and said, this is a awesome idea. I want to build it with you. And. And so he took the premise of how I built that in and actually wrapped it up into the plugin.
And that's how I ended up with the plugin.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:10:37] Okay. That's yeah, that's really nice that you've got like a, somebody helping you right from the get go. I think that's brilliant. The, the purpose of it though, I am going to try and I'm going to fail, so I'll do my, I'll do my 15 second introduction to the plugin and then you rip it to pieces as I blatantly get it wrong.
So the principle is that right? you own a bunch of domains, but you don't want to install WordPress onto those domains because you're single person is to have a page per domain. So let's say for example, you've got my fabulous product.com, my phobia fabulous product to.com. Now you could put a WordPress install on both of those domains and you've got the overhead of maintaining it, looking after it, setting it all up and so on.
Would it be better if you could just map those domains? Yeah, on the DNS level to, a unique WordPress, which we'll never, it'll be seen by the real world. so you map my fabulous product.com to a page or a post or a custom post type on this other domain that I think is what it is.
Jason Schuller: [00:11:40] Correct. it really was just beating the overhead of a multisite install, especially for this type of content and page.
there are a lot of marketing type folks out there who just want these singular pages to funnel people down a certain path and they are really simplistic. Sites. for the most part, single page websites and multisite by far is way too complex for something like that. And you're right. It's a lot of overhead.
and that's what we really do solve with landing kit, because let's be honest, you could redirect your domain to a single page on a primary domain, but that doesn't really solve the problem. If you really want to get specific for what you're trying to market and way of product or newsletter or service that only requires that single page.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:12:28] Yeah. and just to be clear, that is the premise here. We are mapping a domain to a single page. This isn't like pages and sub pages and different sites. That's the job of a, a completely unique install, a WordPress or a multisite or something. So it's literally something.com or dot whatever, over to a single post or page.
Jason Schuller: [00:12:46] Yeah. we've had a requirement since launching and I didn't see this coming, but we have had a requirement to be compatible with child pages just for the sake of, if I did have that singular product. And I did want like a confirmation page, let's say a thank you page. Or a certain type of funnel sub page after the call to action has been executed.
there is that, rare need for a child page to be supported under that domain. so we are working on an update that it will allow you to use child pages as well under any map, domain and page.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:20] that was a question I had for later. So that's interesting. So on a roadmap is the ability to put a modest number of pages, presumably like some kind of conversion or page that you reach after successfully filling out a form or what have you, that's coming that's on the road.
Nice.
Jason Schuller: [00:13:34] Yeah. And the line we have to draw in the sand is, where do you. Stop before you're just recreating multisite So that's something we don't want to delve into. And there have been quite a few feature requests that kind of delve into that nature. And it's okay, we just need to cut it off at this point.
cause otherwise you're just needing a multisite install.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:13:56] yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. I actually posted about this into our Facebook group a couple of weeks ago and I said, how interesting I thought it was. And that was the immediate thing. what, with the technical WordPress users can probably with a click of a few buttons and a few lines of a command line, get a WordPress installed going, but that's not the typical.
User that you're after I suspect you're after somebody who just wants something nice and straightforward, really easy. They've got their site over here. They've got their DNS or registrar over there and the two just combined to make it easy. And, and of course the audience for this, is people who are building websites, maybe not so much landing pages, but there is a whole broad selection of people using WordPress who are simply using it for that purpose.
One page. That's all it's useful for.
Jason Schuller: [00:14:42] Yeah. I have a lot of friends in the industry who are those type of people who, they're launching something new, what seems like every other day. And they're usually spooling up a new install of WordPress for each thing. And it's taxing from a hosting standpoint, it's taxing from a management standpoint, it just gets cluttery after awhile and hard to maintain.
And. And those were the folks who reached out to me immediately and said, this is something that's needed because this is something I'm doing on a monthly basis. and if I could just maintain that primary domain and launch my sub-sites. using a singular WordPress install, hookup domains. It's a lifesaver for them.
Yeah.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:15:20] Yeah. And that the process is ridiculously trivially easy. It takes a matter of, I suspect once you've got your, once you've done it once I reckon you could probably achieve all of this in well under a minute. but the process goes, maybe if I, again, if I try and you can correct me, you, you have installed the plugin.
activate the plugin. And then there's a requirement to say what domain you are going to be mapping to it. So my fabulous product.com you type that into a field. You've got some additional options saying, how do you want this to be connected? Do you know HTTP, HTTPS? And then you click go. And from the WordPress site point of view, that's done.
Then you head over to your DNS. And I believe you set up an, a record. I think that's right. Just pointing to the IP address of the domain that's on. And from that moment on it should just work.
Jason Schuller: [00:16:08] Yeah. those are the few little requirements. You do need a static IP for your primary host domain, wherever we're pressing is installed so that you can create those a records.
Cause otherwise WordPress is that can to know, that this is a domain coming in and what to do with it. so yeah, it's really easy peasy after that point. Once you have your static domain, once you have WordPress installed, you create a few pages you want to map domain. So those pages, once you give it that first go it's, it should be easy, really easy to do after that first domain.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:16:38] So is your recommendation then that you purchase. Presumably a unique domain in order to have this plugin on it. Because from all account, I could be wrong about this. It might be that it exposes itself in some way, but I believe you can turn that off and we'll get onto that with SEO and all that in a minute.
But this domain could literally be just a string of Otter. Random characters. You can just hit the keyboard randomly for 20 seconds. X, Y, P for nine to three.com would be fine. It would work because it's never exposed on the public internet. Would that, is that true or is there a reason why you would still
Jason Schuller: [00:17:13] want a good
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:14] landing page?
Sorry. Purchase a domain for the plugin that makes some kind of sense.
Jason Schuller: [00:17:19] Yeah, you do need the purchase domains for the plugin. You can't just enter a random string of characters and then attack, for it to work. it, it would recognize that domain is not real and that it would not be able to connect to the page.
So Phil has put in a lot of checks and balances in that way so that you can't just, enter a random domain. and we're actually gonna extend that functionality quite a bit so that there are. Greenville green lights and red lights. So we want to know if that domain is actually properly connected to your IP address.
So if your DNS records are created, you're going to get a green light on that domain and that it's successfully connected and mapped to that page.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:17:59] I think I did a bad job of explaining that question, because what I was thinking was the domain onto which you install the plugin, the WP landing kit, plugin that.
Could be just a completely round Sherm.
Jason Schuller: [00:18:13] Yeah, of
Nathan Wrigley: [00:18:13] course. Yeah. Sorry. That's what I tried, sorry. I really explained that badly. So the domain that you purchase in order to install the plugin in it, the one, if you like where you're going to create all of your landing pages, that you're going to point all of your other domains to, that's never really seen by the world.
And that could just be any old junk. It doesn't need to be.
Jason Schuller: [00:18:31] yeah. It could be. I think for the most part, that's not what it's going to be. at least that's from what I've seen. for the most part, people have their primary domain, which is either their personal brand or their business brand that they're running most of their marketing through.
So like for me, maybe it would be, even though Jason schuler.com doesn't exist yet, but for me, maybe it would be Jason schuler.com. I'm writing, I'm blogging. I'm talking about everything I'm doing, but maybe I have this concept for, a newsletter that I want to push out. I want that to be under a different domain.
That's what I would use landing kit for. I would just create a page, use a page template to, basically create a landing page for that newsletter. And then I would map maybe Michael news newsletter.com to that page. And that way I don't have to create a new instance of WordPress. That's under my primary.
WordPress installation for Jason schuler.com and I'm good to go. Yeah. So I haven't seen yet anybody using it in way of, I just need a junk WordPress install to, actually manage all these sites. I haven't come across that quite yet.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:19:37] There you go. That's my unique brain working there in terms of, yeah.
So one of the things that I know that you've taken care of, but again, I'm sure that people are thinking, Oh, hang on a minute. What about this is the notion that there might be some sort of duplicate content? What I mean by that is there's a page on Jason schuler.com, which is where you've housed the plugin, forward slash my fabulous product.
And also there's my fabulous product.com. It's getting quite technical. and they're the same. So does the plugin I don't know, use some sort of redirect and say, actually, this is the canonical one over
Jason Schuller: [00:20:08] here, or yeah. so we were leaving that in way of option up to you.
So obviously probably will not want to have duplicate content, but we didn't want to assume that you wanted to redirect that initial post. But we leave the option in there if you want to create that redirects. So there is no duplicate content. We have that in place for any map page slash domain.
So that if you want to remove that duplicate content, just check the box that says, I want to redirect this initial post. To the, actually the actual map domain, you can do that. Or if you leave it unchecked, you'll have two instances of that content, which like you said, there might be an issue with that.
But again, we didn't want to assume that's how people wanted to use it. So we left it as an option to check or uncheck.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:20:57] Okay. Yeah. Great. And, is there any sort of limitation, I know that in the pricing model, which we'll get to later, this may. Crop up, but are there any limit limitations should you buy?
Let's say the premium version, the more expensive version for the amount of times you can do. So are there it stops at a hundred domains? It won't work after that or five or whatever.
Jason Schuller: [00:21:16] Yeah. We haven't limited the number of domains you can map. We've limited the number of installs you can use it with.
So like with your basic license, we basically said you can install this on that three instances. and you can map infinity domains under those three. It says, for the developer package, we've just unlocked all of that. there's also, this plan of getting into templates and potentially even Gutenberg blocks.
And so we've limited that basic license to let's say, Oh, you can. Choose three templates out of all these templates that we plan on making and for the dev pack, we're just saying access to all.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:21:54] Yeah. W we'll come to that in a minute, but that's great. Thank you. So what is it we're able to map it to now the obvious ones are going to be, okay.
I've made a post. I want that to be where my fabulous domain.com got goes or a post or a page. Anything beyond that, can you, for example, user custom post type.
Jason Schuller: [00:22:13] Yeah, you can use any singular instance of a post page or any other custom post type. We really want to extend it to custom post types. Although I think for the majority of people are probably going to be using this with pages, but I realized that people are probably organizing via custom post type too.
let's say you have a WooCommerce install and you've you have this. Specific custom post site for your products and maybe one of those products, you want to hook up to custom domain with a different type of template. So we really wanted to extend it in way of custom post types, too, so that it's compatible with those types of plugins and page builders and whatever else you might want on a do in combination of Gutenberg or.
Anything else.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:22:56] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And you mentioned that on the roadmap, you've got this idea of templates in the future. What are you meaning by that? is, are you going to like predesigned pages that you can drop in to make life even easier?
Jason Schuller: [00:23:10] Yeah. I've been creating landing pages since, I dunno, since I saw my WordPress theme business in 2014, I really wanted to go down that path of creating really simplistic solutions that solve specific problems.
and that kind of led me down creating landing pages and having all the functionality bundled into that landing page that solves that specific problem. So example, like if you wanted to sell a book, maybe you just need a singular page for that with maybe some, an intro about the book, a book image.
Ways of purchasing that book and maybe some, I don't know, use or feedback from readers on the book. so those are the kinds of templates I want to do. Like solving really niche specific problems, all in one package. So that if you are interested in launching like a single page book website, you could do it right off the bat without having to think about Gutenberg.
And how am I going to organize this or organize that there might be some folks out there who might just want to. Out of box solution
Nathan Wrigley: [00:24:11] and is the intention then that there will be some kind of interface with imagery and thumbnails of what these will look like. And you click a button and it updates rather like a, I don't know, the way you might use a modern page builder.
you click on templates in imported and then you can start to interact with it, modify it, change the text around and whatnot.
Jason Schuller: [00:24:29] Yeah. And we're releasing these templates and way of ad-ons. So they're essentially little plugins that you would activate. So if you had. like Elementor installed as your, is your primary theme.
For example, this would not interfere with that. You can use it in addition to that, we wanted to make sure that, you probably have a theme that you love and use for your primary domain. So these, when you activate them, they are activated in way of page template. And so if you were to go to create a page, that page template would then be available for you to use.
And configure separately from your primary theme and domain. we didn't want to bloat down the plugin either, which is also the reason we're talking about releasing these as ad-ons instead of bundled what the, okay.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:25:14] So that, that would be in the developer package. We'll again, we'll come to the pricing at the end, but you've got like the.
Simple split pricing. You've got the standard package, you've got the developer package, but the roadmap includes those templates in the developer version. Okay. That's good to know. And what about, you mentioned Guttenberg and blocks and I'm trying to think how this might work with block song.
I'm just going to say, what does that mean? Tell us what you're thinking.
Jason Schuller: [00:25:40] Yeah, again, it extends down that road of okay. How these templates are coming together. I've already got five or six templates made in way of design and functionality. It's a matter of how they've all come together.
So maybe somebody doesn't want that out of box solution. in way of template, that's not completely customizable. So I'm trying to make compartmentalize aspects of those templates down to blocks that you could use with any theme and organize, however you want. just little snippets of functionality that you could use to build landing pages out of box.
I don't want to here's the other fine line of what I don't want to cross. I don't want to. I don't want to create another page builder. that's the thing I don't want to.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:24] Yeah. I was wondering if it was going to stop like that. Yeah.
Jason Schuller: [00:26:27] that's a whole,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:29] it's a
Jason Schuller: [00:26:29] whole different business, right?
I don't want to get into that business, but I do see a realm where there are blocks. We create that solve a specific problem. I'm not. Entirely in the realm of template, but in the realm of a piece of something that you could use with your existing. So that's the idea behind blocks and I haven't, we haven't fully circled round two.
Figuring out what that looks like yet. We're going to focus on templates
Nathan Wrigley: [00:26:54] first. Okay. you mentioned page builders, I'm guessing because of the nature of the way this works, that there's literally no restriction on any kind of theme, any kind of page builder, because that seems to be the direction of travel.
Doesn't it? Page builders are in the ascendancy. That seems to be the modern way of doing things for a lot of people. there's no restrictions there, basically, if it exists as a page or a post or anything else for that matter, You can link to it as a sort of WP landing kit, the destination domain.
Jason Schuller: [00:27:23] Yeah. It's that's where it's really become extremely powerful. I didn't realize that so many people, having just jumped back into this WordPress ecosystem. We're still relying on page builders. I would have figured Gutenberg would have crushed them all. But, it's just not the case. there's so many folks out there using things like Elementor Beaver builder, any of the other ones that are existing out there that have a strong and loyal customer base.
And so what we've done is reached out to a lot of those folks and, we've done our due diligence in making sure that everything works properly and that landing kit won't interfere at all. With whatever you're using in way of page builder,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:28:01] there's a lot of those page builders are incredibly popular and they bring a lot of the, kind of the design elements.
Shall we say of landing pages out of the box? you install the element or a plugin or BeaverBuilder or breezy or whatever it is. You want to use and there's whole page layouts and templates and what have you. And very often landing pages is one of them, including all the forms that need to be filled in and the redirects and, the integrations with, CRMs and autoresponders and all that.
It's all just built in. So it seems like a marriage made in heaven. It's literally click a button. And if your intention is simply to launch a book and you've really not that bothered about finessing the design, you just want something quick. That seems like a match made in heaven. Really.
Jason Schuller: [00:28:47] Yeah, and it really was a coincidence.
So I'm not a Facebook user at all. I can't stand Facebook. I haven't used it in years, but one of my first customers reached out to me and she was like, Hey, there's, there are these. Essentially, SAS, Facebook groups out here that are heavily WordPress centric in way of page builders. And what they're doing with those page builders and landing kit has come up in those groups.
So now I'm in the Facebook ecosystem and managing these threads of hundreds of comments of questions about landing get, and to be honest, like the majority of our custom base has come from those. group so far, it's really interesting to see, but there's such a community out there for these type of people who are using these page builders that do it right.
Exactly what you just said. And, yeah, we've really tapped. Into that these past several weeks and leveraged those groups too, to our advantage and helping them do what they really want to do with landing kit.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:29:45] Like me, you're like a guy that has clients and you build websites.
And usually those websites are multiple pages. it's very rare that I build a landing page, which is the sole purpose of the domain. That in other words, the whole domain is consumed by just this one page or. Maybe a couple of pages. do you think this has a sort of purpose in my art? Is this something you would, you would still advise me to get, especially with like pricing, let's get on to that.
Now. are you offering a price which is likely to go up into the future or is it like you just stay like this, in the foreseeable future?
Jason Schuller: [00:30:20] Yeah, I, right now I think we have really a really solid price point and way of what landing kit does for you. the functionality contained, and also assuming the roadmap that we fill and I have developed together over these past several weeks.
I think this price point of 59, one 59, and we just launched a limited time lifetime package. For two 59, that we're gonna cap, we're using that lifetime package as a way to fund future development for this plugin so that we can put a little bit more time into it. and we're going to cap it at a hundred licenses.
It's our thought process there. Let's use it to fund, development and time because like you, I do freelance work. and what led me down this isn't. A tool for me because I do create a lot of singular landing page for clients, in way of coming soon pages and, Yeah. And so that's something that I would use myself, and those are really the best things to build.
When you're going to build a premium products, you would use yourself.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:31:21] That's really interesting though. So just to be clear, you've got the sticking around forever licenses at the moment. We've got standard at 59, developer at one five nine. And the difference is you get unlimited activations on the developer as opposed to three.
on the standard and you will also get, when they arrive, you get the ability to use every single templates. It says all templates coming soon. Or if you go for the $59 license, then you're looking at one template that's per annum, 59, us dollars. And maybe who knows, maybe by the time this podcast comes out, which we always record them.
A little bit in advance. Maybe there's an opportunity to still grab a kind of lifetime deal, but it may be that's gone. It's being, it's helping fund the project.
Jason Schuller: [00:32:11] Yeah. again, Phil and I, this is this was. A test, like it was a side project. Let's see if we can make something of this.
It's something we're both very interested in something we want to build out. But in order for us to put more than that part, time into it, we need a little bit of funding upfront and so far so good. things have been really well. there seems to be a lot of interest. There's definitely a lot in way of featured that we want to build and support and things that people are talking about.
So that's the reasoning behind that lifetime deal is, it's a good way to fund future development.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:32:46] yeah, absolutely. Why not dead? we didn't get on to support one of the key things. Our audiences. Constantly talking about, is that, Oh, the support's gone dead or whatever.
what are the support mechanisms that you've got? Are you email? Have you got chat or, and how long two day turnaround, one day turnaround. How are you trying to manage that?
Jason Schuller: [00:33:05] Yeah. for the most part I've been Phil and I have been managing fairly well. There hasn't been a ton of support, to be honest, it's mostly pre-purchased questions.
There have been a few hosts, in way of how they manage additional domains that landing kit hasn't worked with, but I've reached out to those hosts and, maintaining active conversations to see if they would be interested in. Extending their functionality and how they, how their add on domains work.
But for the most part, Lenny kit has worked with the majority of hosts. and WordPress hosts is what I'm talking about. Yeah. But in way of support, we're using Freshdesk for all these tickets. if it's dev related, I handed off the fill, if it's pre-purchase or. Or just simple question related. I'd take care of it.
And it's usually one day turnaround.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:33:52] Oh, great. Yeah. That's great. Any technical things that came up along the way, apart from the host that you didn't anticipate, were there any kind of roadblocks that you thought this'll be fairly easy to implement and then suddenly, Oh, hang on about that.
Jason Schuller: [00:34:04] Honestly, it's interesting that the hosting aspect of things is really where we've run into the most, the biggest issue. Like there are so many different stacks of what people use in way of hosting with WordPress and. I had assumed that most people are just using a WordPress centric type of host.
and we've tested against most of those hosts and most of them work, but some people are using a really strange back towards whether it be digital ocean mixed with this mix, what that mix with that. And those things, those little things are causing some problems, but we're working through them. the other thing, again, that people requested right off the bat was.
The ability to use child pages for child pages to be compatible with landing kit. So you map a domain to a page and then you want my domain.com to be compatible with whatever child pages you add under that page. And so that's the big one that has come up over and over again that we want to address.
Sooner than later,
Nathan Wrigley: [00:35:02] do you are planning to implement that. And I suppose at some point, the question gets raised, like you alluded to earlier, at what point does it become? this is just a multisite now. so have you got any kind of insights into where you're going to go with?
Jason Schuller: [00:35:13] yeah.
people have asked for, support and way of. Categories and tags and things like that too. And I think that's jumping into the realm of, I think that's jumping more into the realm of multisite right. Where, okay. You want taxonomy now under map domain under a singular WordPress install? I think that's just, multi-site at that point.
and so I get the child page thing. It makes sense to me, of course, you might want to funnel a customer. Or down a certain path or, the very least, if somebody submits a form of some kind. Display a thank you page or a confirmation page. So that type of thing makes sense complete and total sense to me.
Or maybe you have a privacy policy page that you need to serve up with your single page. so those little things. Yeah, it makes sense. But when you're starting to get into taxonomy, And that type of thing to me, that's multi-site
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:04] yeah, because the user interface that I've seen on the video, incidentally, you should go to WP London, kit.com and watch Jason's videos about four and a half minutes, something like that.
But it manages to explain in a very short space of time out, absolutely everything that it currently does. and the domains page, the basically that where you interact with the plugin is just a list, a flat list of. Of domains. And of course, if you suddenly start to introduce some pages and child pages and all of this kind of stuff, then you've got to rethink that whole UI went away, but go, where do you put them all?
Jason Schuller: [00:36:38] Yeah. and right now it's really simplistic because you can manage those domains. Whether you're editing a page, you can hook up to hook it up to a domain there, or you can go to the domains page and hook them up there. And so right now it's really simplistic and easy to use, and we want to maintain that as we dive into new feature.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:36:54] So yeah. Yeah. And so you're bullish about this. you believe like you're, you I don't know, struck gold is the right phrase, but this is something which you are confident about. You've got enough interest to keep it going. Yeah.
Jason Schuller: [00:37:06] I've always wanted to release a plugin and I've never really had the right.
Okay. The idea, and this was just a whim kind of thing. It was functionality that I was using for a project of my own. And again, it was just that tweet, would you be with this, would the WordPress community be interested in this? And it was an overwhelming. Yes. And that's what made me realize it was one of those things that I should probably go after.
the other right decision there was finding a plugin developer. not that I couldn't have built it myself. I could. Yeah. But I wanted somebody that fully understood the admin experience and who could make a native feeling. A native feeling functionality within that admin, because I didn't want to diversify from the WordPress admin and take you away from that experience as much as maybe I don't drive with it.
the WordPress is not the most beautiful thing, but I think people are used to it. And I wanted to, I want to. This, the field cohesive. so that's why I wanted to find a developer who just was in that world already. so that was good.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:38:12] Yeah. Thank you. just before we end, we've used up, a fairly decent amount of time.
I'm going to ask if, is there any place that a Twitter handle a different URL, some other project that you want to mention, basically the floor is yours. You can use it, how you wish.
Jason Schuller: [00:38:26] Sure. you can find me in everything I'm working on. this is another project of mine. It's called disco D S K o.app and slash Jason.
and you'll find my profile and everything I'm working on there. And you can grade your own profiles and link other profiles to things you're working on. It's another little fun app I build, using WordPress. So you can have a look at that and. And know that it's built on WordPress and you, if you were coming in and didn't know WordPress, you wouldn't even know.
So it's just fun. It's a fun little project to see and what you can actually do with WordPress.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:01] I'll bet loads of people will misspell Jason. J S Oh no, J a S. that's fabulous. Thank you for talking to us. What I'm going to say is just before we leave WP London, kit.com forward slash pricing is the place where you can purchase this, strip off the pricing at the end, just to find out about what all the features are and what have you a fabulous.
Simple to use one purpose plugin and I'm, I'm bullish about it. I think it's a great idea, especially for marketers and people building single landing pages who just want to strip out the burden of maintaining a multisite or just installing WordPress over and over again. So congratulations and thanks for joining us
Jason Schuller: [00:39:39] today.
Appreciate it.
Nathan Wrigley: [00:39:41] I hope that you enjoyed that, and I hope that you learned something that plugin, I can see it having so many uses, particularly for people who just want to set up a website quickly, buy a domain, and then move on perhaps very quickly to a different product or service. Very easy to point your domains out to one WordPress install and have things managed in one easy to update place.
Such a great idea. Thanks Jason, for speaking to us this week. The WP Builds podcast was brought to you by the page builder summit. Do you use a page builder to create your WordPress sites or perhaps you're curious about what they can do, whether it's element or BeaverBuilder Guttenberg breezy oxygen or any other page builder, the page builder summit that'll have something for you.
It's running from the fifth to the 9th of October, and you can check out the amazing speaker list and get your place for [email protected]. And AB split test. Do you want to set up your AB split test in record time? The new AB split test plugin for WordPress. We'll have you up and running in a couple of minutes.
Use your existing pages and test anything against anything else. Buttons, images, headers, rows, anything. And the best part it works with element or Beaver builder and the WordPress block editor. You can check it out and get a free [email protected]. Okay. That's all I've got for you for the podcast this week, but don't forget.
Join us Monday 7:00 AM I'll release. The WP Builds weekly. WordPress news, 2:00 PM for the WP Builds a live version of that news. Join us. WP Builds.com forward slash live or forward slash Facebook. If you're in our Facebook group, which I hope that you are, and we may be chatting to Sabrina's or Dan on Tuesday.
We may have some other things go to WP Builds.com to find out more, have a good week cheesy music about to fade in. And my goodness is it cheesy this week? Bye bye. For now.
