Bricks WordPress theme and pagebuilder review

hey everyone it's johnny from wp johnny and today i'm going to review the bricks theme from thomas elrig a rig i forgot his name uh who is thomas and why am i such a big fan of his work well thomas did the happy files plugin i'm sure he's did a couple others i can't remember right now but his work is solid his coding is great and what i love is his he's a visionary i think he creates simple solutions that are very unique that solve real-world problems that are really like anything he creates is to solve problems it's not just like a business idea he's not just rehashing uh successful products out there and putting his own spin on it to make money i love what he does i think he's a true developer in every sense of the word a developer a creator an artist and a pioneer in the wordpress community so let's talk about this bricks theme what it is what it does so by the way it's super cheap 149 lifetime license and you can use on as many sites as you want i highly recommend it uh i think it's worth it and i don't just say this about every product okay so i think it's worth it even if you only use it for two sites i think it's worth it a lot of fun to use so let's talk about the existing the existing uh the current landscape right now with the whole wordpress gutenberg thing you have people who want to use page builders and then you have people who want a fast site and if you want a fast site you kind of have no choice but to use gutenberg but when you use gutenberg you get an editing experience that while is maybe okay for people like me might not be okay for people who are accustomed to elementor divi and all that right because this is this is the gutenberg editor experience right now this is what it looks like you go here and you pick a block right and uh okay fine i i use uh media and text and then i pick another block and and it's fine it's super fast for me makes total sense but maybe for clients or maybe somebody who's not so used to gutenberg they want something different they want something that looks like the front end they don't want to see all this wasted white space they don't want to design complicated layouts with only what 800 700 pixels worth of screen width so we have this battle because then you can yeah sure you can you can install stackable you can install cubely but even then that is still i mean it's close it's closer but it's still not the full page builder experience you also have this other issue this other issue where you install a theme and then you install a page builder and then they fight with each other right like like which one has control over the typography and which one has control over the color styles and all that so anyways with the bricks with the bricks theme the bricks theme has a built-in page builder uh which is the brix brix builder that's what it's called um if i go through this of course it's gonna look nice and all that but let's just try to see what it looks like in the back end so first off when you first start when you first install and activate the bricks theme you have these like little quick quick sections sections that you should read and i highly recommend it it's super fast it's super easy we'll take like two minutes for each one and we'll it'll explain it's it's super simple but you really should read it uh the one that i liked the most was this one and i like to have this one open while i'm working with it i just literally practiced using this thing for 10 minutes before right now so it's not going to be a long video and because i'm going to show you how easy it is so once you've got it installed you're going to go to the brick settings you enable it i'm sorry leave this alone enable it for every post type that you want to be able to edit with the brix builder uh and then from here you can determine um if you want to make all your templates publicly accessible so other people can copy your templates or you can make it so only your other sites that you have access to can copy your templates i think it's really cool that's just going to open the door for so many community templates and whatnot here are the api keys for certain bricks content blocks if you're going to use them and then now we're ready to start playing so normally let's go here to page all right uh normally we go to like i made a demo page and normally we edit it like this and sorry i i'm on an island in mexico okay so the internet's not so fast normally it's like that but now leave that we do edit with bricks and we get the bricks page builder this is just the first revision and already i think it's it's pretty awesome i think it's great clearly this guy has had a lot of time he's thought of many little different things that users would appreciate so oh sorry okay i already built a page so let's let's do something new yeah let's create one i should have did this while i was doing all this talking okay great and let's go back here let's go back to pages and let's edit with bricks if you're a page builder user and you're trying to convert away from from using page builders to use gutenberg because it's faster but you are having problems this is the ultimate theme for you by the way in case you guys want to see views of the beach beautiful views beautiful people beautiful food and then there's me i'm beautiful okay uh all right so here it is it looks exactly like a page builder you just drag and drop elements onto there i'm not gonna do that i'm not gonna start from scratch i'm gonna start with the template right away and here my templates i don't have any let's go to community and uh let's pick let's pick a header yeah let's throw a header into there um how about this one okay and then i'm gonna throw maybe uh content all right i mean normally you would match the style but who cares who the hell cares there you go super easy and as you can see if i click on this i can edit the content of that block that content block here and then i can also edit the style right very simple easy to understand if i go up here i can see the structure which is very useful when you want to get precisely to a certain one or if you want to drag things around can we drag oh wait no no it's just for editing okay if i go up here then now i'm editing only the hover styles i go here i can edit all the pages this is really cool um this is a unique take on the editing experience because your your from here on out you're dealing with only the brix builder experience right you're not skipping back to the wordpress dashboard that it's a couple seconds each time could be annoying i really appreciate this i really appreciate i never needed it but i really appreciate it okay and then over here we go to revision so we can you know discard apply skip back and forth right undo redo all that okay then from here we go to settings and we can go to the page settings so whatever you know disable header or footer if you if you don't want to use the global header design that you made you can you know for this landing page you create its own one-off unique situation seo and what not all the different options then here we can also go to theme styles um so i'm gonna apply like a global theme style right now right and then we can decide uh what the global style is gonna be uh you can choose from a bundle or you can hack your own right you can easily preview your content at different sizes and i love how it's right here i don't know why it's just so it's so intuitive to have it here i feel like this builder has everything i need but doesn't take up so much space doesn't take me uh forever to learn how to do anything um then over here to preview check out this preview mode boom preview right there done you want to see on the front end click that and you see it on the front end so i mean i think it's magical and all this is done using gutenberg blocks the the native gutenberg blocks elements so i think it's so clever i think it's really so clever your site is going to be blatantly blazing fast um and you still get to have the page builder experience now uh are there are there any cons so yes i'm really trying to nitpick this thing so the first con that came to mind is that sometimes it's annoying to delete stuff so here i'm going to try to delete this element i have to click sure and then you see it was hard like maybe maybe i click again oh that's what it is i just click again and it disappears okay well now i feel stupid because i made a bigger deal than had to be done okay so just click in the same place and it disappears okay i was trying to like click the word sure the tag sure and and i kept miss clicking all right so i'm a noob um the only the only other complaint really is that maybe there's not enough like super polished designs on here and that's totally fine because it's it literally just came out um you know ooh we can choose to replace the content we can choose whether or not to import the images with the with with the template or not i love that so um now what about for content that is already created right because that's going to be uh a question for content that's already created you can i guess convert that good existing gutenberg data into bricks or you can reconvert it the other way where you save existing bricks as gutenberg data i think that's what that means um overall you know guys i'm a big fan i'm a huge fan of this experience i think it's a lot of fun um i think it's a lot of fun if you are a heavy hardcore page builder user but you want to like convert your way into gutenberg and you hate the gutenberg experience so far brick's theme is ultimately that you have to get it okay so for you guys you got to get it now what about for someone like me i'm a developer i know what i'm doing i love the existing gutenberg editor already i've got no problems with it but i gotta say i kind of enjoy the visualness of this right um it's kind of it's it's it's using the native it's using the native wordpress gutenberg editor um it's also probably relying on the native uh full site editing capability i don't know if it is but but anyway um and i love that it's everything's harmonious everything works together it's fast it's clean it's easy i could see myself enjoying this on a couple sites you know maybe for a couple sites where i want to have you know some custom template and theme parts and i'm too lazy to code it from scratch and acf this and all that uh i think the brix builder is it has a lot of room to be a super powerful tool once people start building add-ons for it once people start throwing third-party templates out there it's incredible so you know the only question left is for 150 bucks should you buy it is it really a must buy like ah i hate to do this because i hate that thomas did this because he's throwing a wrench into my my already full toolbox i think it's a great deal you guys even if you use it for only two sites you know he's it's a very unique solution and more important than just creating a new product he's creating a new workflow it's a new way of working within wordpress that i think could be more efficient and more fun for many developers out there i really believe it if you're you want a minimalist theme that doesn't doesn't wrestle with your page builder you want to use gutenberg but with a page builder more page builder rich workflow you want a page builder that doesn't lag your site and give you awful scores awful page scores brix builder the bricks theme is an easy winner for 150 lifetime license it's a no-brainer so you know even if it was 100 a year i think it's a no-brainer um but yeah i hope you guys enjoyed the video i will put this into a i will do a write-up on this and and release it on my site but other than that i think it's a win all around i really tried to poke at this and i told thomas already i was going to criticize it but actually i really love it this thing is freaking awesome see you guys next time peace out from mexico

Channel: WPJohnny - WordPress Performance Guides & Reviews

Views: 1,093

Keywords: wordpress theme review, bricks wordpress theme, bricks wordpress pagebuilder, wordpress pagebuilder review, wordpress gutenberg guide

Id: xZp5GXFyDl0

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021