Lockdown Live S03E01

okay so it's 8 p.m in the uk and we're trying a new time on the live stream so if you could let me know in the chat if you can see me and you can hear me okay that would be absolutely awesome fingers crossed that everything will work out the way it needs to so if you could let me know that'd be fantastic and then we'll go through and do the usual welcomes to all those lovely peeps that are in the chat already watching this so please do let me know in the chat section and for now i'll just say thank you very much for taking the time out of your day your evening to come and join me and i'm looking forward to doing a live stream again it's been quite a while uh okay so yep you can see and hear me thank you very much i can see here you look and what was that kyle was that something nice or something you look and sound excellent thank you very much my young man okay so if you are new to the live stream please do hashtag new in the chat if you are an old timer as in you've been here many times before just put hashtag old timer and i'll just take a little look a little later on and say hello to some new people that are joining in tonight so this isn't going to be a really in-depth live stream literally i just want to test things out in the new studio make sure everything works okay i'm trying a few different things out different setup as you can see probably different microphone setup those kinds of things so i just want to make sure that everything looks and sounds okay ready for when we start doing the live streams on a regular basis and there are some other things coming up to do with should we say type like live streams so i'm not going to say too much about that but just keep an eye on the facebook group and on twitter and as soon as we know it's a little bit more uh information then i'll be letting you know i think you'll like the new plans that are coming up anyway so good to see so many people popping in tonight and thank you very much for putting the hashtag ultima or hashtag new into the chat it's great to see a good combination of both new and old users so visitors i should say should know more participants let's go for participants and you'll notice tonight i'm still on the water so if anybody's having a beer please have one for me i'm sure you'll appreciate it more than i will right now so okay so what i want to kind of cover in tonight's live stream i'll just quickly go over a couple of the ideas that i've got and then i will go through and say hello to everybody probably so there's a couple of things that i've been kind of toying with over the last couple of months one of the key things is to move away from the reliance that lots of us have on page builders inside the wordpress kind of ecosystem and one of the main reasons is no matter how good these page builders actually are there are still intrinsic issues that come up with them the bloat that comes with them the fact that once we start to use page builders and start to combine those with you know our theme and with all the content we want to do and additional plugins and so on we end up then having to install extra plugins or using services to speed everything up and this kind of feels just a little counter-intuitive so yes we got that sort of that ease of use that we get with page builders but then like i say we have to then look at the other side where we have to go through a lot of time and effort to make sure that we optimize everything and then we've got obviously more plugins mean more potential for problems so i released a video a couple of days ago where i simply just used the bloxy pro theme alongside acfre and that was a really good learning experience for me because it opened my eyes to some of the things that you could do with a really simple combination and just a little bit of tweaking and using some of the functions inside that particular theme now you wouldn't be limited to a theme like sorry like um bloxy you could use other themes i mean cadence pro probably has a lot the same features and so on so i'm not just extolling the versions of one single theme but picking a good base theme makes the whole process a lot easier so part of this meant that going through the process of creating something like this questions came up in the comment section on the facebook group and in my own head but how can we expand this how can we do things like add filters into this how can we do things like expand the amount of dynamic content that we include there and go above what the normal theme gives us so i've been digging in and working alongside sergio who was one of the the main guys behind the bloxy theme to go over some of the shortcomings that i had in my understanding of the theme and i think i've got some really nice options that i think will open a lot of possibilities for people that don't want to rely upon page builders and one of the key things my partner said this to me was sort of sat there showing her exactly what i'd set up and the first thing she said was wow that's quick and that's come from someone that doesn't really need to do anything to do with web design couldn't care less about a page builder from a theme from a plug-in but that was on the first commerce you came up with was how quick it was using it so that in itself is a good indicator of how you can bypass a lot of the need for optimizing everything you do when it comes to page builders so please let me know in the chat if this is something you'd be interested in because i'm working on the idea for the tutorial at the moment but i haven't actually fleshed the entire thing out yes there are going to be limitations on what you could achieve simply you know if you want to go beyond this then there's other tools out there that might actually be useful and learning a little bit of the basics of using acf short codes a little bit of coding experience things like that can go a long long way but again i've got lots of little tools and tips to help you bypass some of those limitations in your own understanding of how tools like acf and that look and work okay so that's some of the things that i wanted to sort of talk about sorry i said your arrest no i'm not talking about you you're okay i'm talking about a different surgeon and i hope i'm saying that name correctly because uh i don't know okay so that's kind of what i wanted to sort of talk about today one of the things i want to talk about today and there's a couple other things depend upon the time scales and the questions and things that come in that you know it'll dictate how far we want to go with this and what i want to cover but i want to try to stick to one hour tonight because well i just do i think i sort of want to just stick to something nice and simple okay so let's have a little look at some of you lovely people that are in tonight i'm going to quickly go and do a search for the hashtag new and i do apologize if i ruin anybody's name right at this point and i'm gonna start off with a simple one that i definitely can say tim keeley good evening to you thank you very much for joining us mohamed good to see you in as well andrea i hope i said that i always said that correctly i don't know if i didn't i do apologize i'm telling all the names splendid days travel good evening to you lindy barker good to see you in as well and we've got i'm not even going to attempt to say that she's going to pop that up on screen and just say good evening to you as well and sergio new on live old followers so thank you very much for joining in to the live stream it's been quite a while but i think um yeah we're going to have some fun over the next couple of weeks with the different things that i've got planned mr gecko new but i'm not new well come on now that's a name that i know alfonso brown good to see you in as well so thank you very much for joining in tonight and a couple of the old timers so let's just do a little search for you guys so we've got charlie bird always a pleasure to have you in brian good to see you dirk always good to see you in goran michael mclaughlin alf eugenio good to see you could make it and no we that's a cracking him i like that one davey dennis chris olivieri and kyle now anybody that uh that doesn't know kyle you need to go over to the admin bar facebook group get involved in that it's a fantastic group to be involved in okay so thank you very much like i say for getting involved in tonight's live stream i'm open to questions on anything that i cover so if you've got a question just do hashtag a question so i can see exactly who's asking questions and i can favorite those and i can take a look at those then as we go through everything so let me just go down to take a look at the comments and things and if you're wondering why i'm looking this way is because instead of using the laptop like i've done for quite a long time i've made sure that i've got everything set up so i can see things just a little bit better have more on screen and we can see exactly what's going on hopefully it'll be a little bit of a smoother stream so we've got a lot more people in good to see you in els a pleasure as always and if anybody that doesn't know else she's part of the facebook group and an absolute mine of knowledge so if everybody could take a moment just to say good evening ells and thank you for the help and support you provide on the facebook group that would be absolutely awesome it's an amazing person marco castro good to see you in as well and vodka always a pleasure hope sunny liverpool is not too bad at the moment okay so if you've got any questions on the kinds of things that i want to cover in this kind of thing i'm going to show you a demonstration of the type of site that i'm going to show you how to build and this is just a really simple starting point example i will flesh this out a lot more as part of the tutorial but it'll give you a good idea of what i'm actually trying to achieve and why i want to move away from the reliance we have upon page builders so john hassey good to see that you are interested in this um okay cool right so if i just go over to my screen share a second so this is the type of site that i'm talking about now it doesn't really matter the fact that this is going to be using uh or probably will be using sort of real estate as a backdrop for what's going on it's more a case of showing you how this is predominantly done just inside the theme with acf3 installed and i'm using filter everything again another free plugin which i've got a video coming out tomorrow to show you how i've done this particular setup for the filtering side of things so you can see how easy it is to integrate it into a process like this but this entire thing is done directly inside block see there's not a page builder in sight in all honesty other than those tools i've just mentioned there's nothing much else included in this setup as you can see we've got a typical kind of layout you've got your different properties they're sectioned up by the different types of properties so apartments houses and so on different locations you can see we've got advanced custom fields information at the top and this is really simple information but we can expand this and put more information in as and when we need to and then if we take a look at the side you can see we've got filters that kind of align with the apartment the house the flats and so on we've got a price range we've got a location as you can see tells us the number of properties in that particular location and these nicely stack on top of each other so i can set that up you can see now that refines things we've got fewer locations in that price bracket i can break these down into apartments in that particular price bracket and if i wanted to if i had additional locations i could break those down inside there as well one of the things i do like with this you can't really see it because i'm using chrome but you can see i'm not using ajax in this example you can use ajax with this plug-in but i like to be able to share the link and i prefer to use something like this where you can see if we shared this link with someone they could come to this page with this link and they will see the filtered version of exactly what i've just sort of shown you on screen so that's pretty cool and if we go in and take a look at one of the properties you can see again we've got a nice looking layout all the normal information inside there and if we come to the top you can see this section at the top which is the location the property price these are acf based fields but instead of using the built-in function we have inside bloxy where we can just insert this in using some simple options i've gone ahead and used the hook feature alongside some acf short codes to be able to pull this information in so now i can style this i can control it i can do a lot of things with this it's just a lot of really simple techniques that when you combine them together you can get a lot of mileage out of this combination and if you scroll down i've been testing out another plug-in because unfortunately when it comes to any of the sort of the block tools that i've used inside gutenberg none of those have a particularly good gallery plug-in so this is basically just using a gallery plug-in that i've tested out completely free looks nice has sharing options and things like that and it's just a gutenberg block so you can just integrate any kind of gutenberg layouts you want into this and combine it with the acf information and so on so that's the kind of thing that i'm going to be showing in that tutorial that i'm talking about so hopefully this has kind of piqued your interest into what you can do with a combination like this and just let your imagination go wild with it you know using these tools removing that reliance and with no optimization when i tested this out when i was doing the other day i was getting in the high 70s or 78 79 on google page speed for mobile devices with no optimization and up around the hundred mark for desktop so already a great starting point and a little bit of tweaking i think would be very very useful to take this even further to get you know really highly optimized sites i didn't optimize the images i literally just downloaded them from pixels and then just uploaded the full thing so i could probably optimize the images get a better score directly but just by doing that so pretty cool i think like i said i'm excited to see what we can do with this so what are your thoughts on this let me know i'm going to go take a look at some of these comments and things like that and we're going to take a look at answering some of those so let me just scroll back up because these are a lot of comments coming in already thank you very much for saying hello to ells and thank you very much because like i say that's uh she's an absolute star absolute gem okay uh cool use my plugin to filter ah good evening to you sir you need to contact me you need to drop me an email hop over to the wp tech's website wptext.com uk and drop me a contact from there we need to have a chat about your plugin but thank you very much for joining in tonight it's much appreciated um okay mr garco so alternative to already great grid builder filtering for search and filter plug-in yeah i like this plug-in like i said there are a couple of little things in there that can sometimes be a little bit quirky but that could be to do with my setup as opposed to anything else but it's fast it's easy to implement it's well thought out and the free version packs a heck of a lot of features if you haven't checked it out there's a video up on the youtube channel just do a search for filter everything and there's a video on there showing you how to use it and get started using it with woocommerce and that's the reason why the one that will be coming out tomorrow is more to do with how you can use this with advanced custom fields because that was a question that got raised a lot in the comment section on that video but unlike in what you can do with this combination and you know there are tons of other combinations and again this is something that i'll be taking a look at looking at in the future where we take a look at like the grid builder plug-in where you've got the good builder wp where you've got the search and the facets and you've got the grid building functions included in there you've got the p.net one um there are several options out there that help you move away from your reliance upon page builders the other thing i want to do as well is to go ahead and set something up with like 500 or 1000 entries inside one of these test sites to see the implications of having a much bigger database going on and see how these sites actually fare with that so pretty cool anyway anyone wait for lifetime deals for black friday yes indeed wp tasker i think we're all waiting for them uh okay that's good to know that the links in the ajax mode are the same again like i say hit me up let's have a talk let's have a chat i'm interested in talking more about your plugin okay stratos i like your plugin found some bugs but it's nice fill the plug-in again i would say that you know if you were coming across testing these things that i love it when the developers actually involved in the community and get involved in listening to what people are talking about listening to any bugs quirks or improvements that can actually be made to you know you plug in your theme whatever it is this is one of the things that i really like about this kind of community aspect of it so i would say reach out to stratos as well genuinely nice person and there's a lot of good work on wordpress and so on and pretty knowledgeable when it comes to those things as well so i think you could benefit from you know contacting us guys and just having a chat about the different things that we may have come across maybe ideas that we've got to streamline things you know whatever just give us a shout okay can we get links underneath when done links to to what exactly i'm not sure what you mean let me know down below and if i can help out i will indeed help out uh wait where's that remove that from the broadcast okay uh kyle your last video for the first time i looked at blocks he's pretty cool so much in the customizer kyle you're absolutely spot on you know there was a lot of hype and a lot of things surrounding the whole bloxy and the cadence kind of we'll call it a bit of a fiasco a couple of or several months back and i think that maybe that put off a lot of people looking at something like bloxy which is a shame because in my opinion bloxy is one of the best themes out there at the moment the free version packs an awful lot inside it and the pro version with the ability to add in like acf fields and things like that opens up a lot of possibilities for simpler sites admittedly you know dynamic sites but not everybody needs to create you know the next right move or something like that you know some people just generally want to be able to create more comprehensive listing sites that don't need to have those integrations with you know real estate sort of third parties and things so i'd say have a look if you've never looked at it it's definitely a really good plug-in and the free version like i say packs an awful lot of punch uh okay do you have the pro version straight up i assume we're talking about filter everything i know i don't know at this point in time i've kind of just stayed with the free version to test things out but i probably will take a look at the pro version a little later on if you have it let me know i'd love to know what your thoughts on if you've tested it out you know give me your feedback on it i always need to it's always good to get different people's opinions uh okay good evening carl good to see you in my young man so great to see carlin hope you're doing well hope everything's okay and let me know if you're still in the uk yeah carl you're late uh you're being docked your pay is being docked that's what i'm saying um okay let's have a little look vodka i just love vloxy i noticed you've come up with a lot of different comments and feedback with regards to using bloxy so i'm glad that you're finding it to be such a solid sort of theme and hopefully they'll have a nice lifetime uh a nice deal over black friday but while i think of it because i keep forgetting to say about this if you are interested in grabbing a copy of bloxy maybe watch this after black friday cyber monday maybe they don't run a deal i have no idea you can get a permanent 10 percent discount by using the code i think it's wp test to check out and that'll give you 10 off the block c pro theme so 10 off is better than nothing off and like i said that goes on for as long as i know so thank you very much to sergio for giving us that um start as i saw you were very excited for 3.5 elementor i don't know if anybody saw my video earlier on about elemental 3.5 the beta release to be honest i thought i was pretty fair and balanced i didn't give them a hard time over it because i think the features they've actually included didn't take the animation ones out which i'm not particularly excited about i think a lot of the other ones the ui enhancements the um the add to favorites those kinds of things i think they're all solid editions and i think they're things that i would much rather see smaller tweaks like that being added to make the whole process of working with this day-to-day easier faster and more intuitive than some of the other things that have been put in you know i'm not so interested in these animation effects and outlines and text on a curve those kind of things but everybody knows that anyway i seem to get a bit of a reputation for giving elementor a bit of a hard time so yeah what can i say but yes uh excitement not necessarily the term i use but i'm pleased to see some of those enhancements to the ui and the user experience as well they are definitely you know they're good to have carl thank you very much i'm live in the new studio as well it's still a work in progress there's still more to do and i still have that that behind the scenes video to put together of the build process and the studio but there's still a few things that need to be done i still need to put more sound panels on the wall i need to get the lighting rig up on the ceiling those kinds of things but once that's all done there will be a behind-the-scenes video to show you the new studio and how things are coming along in there but it's so much easier just to come in here do a live stream any time that i want to do it as opposed to being you know kicking the family out kind of thing so this does make my life a lot easier so thanks carl uh oh right here's a good one and let's let's let's go through this one because this kind of leads on to uh some of the other things that i want to talk about elementor versus bloxy versus gutenberg who will win i don't think anyone will win on that one i think it all comes down to what you're looking to do elementor makes creating more complex sites easier it allows you to create customized woocommerce sites allows you to create dynamic sites there's lots and lots of reasons why a tool like elementor is the right tool for the job bloxy fantastic solid theme with a great customizer lots of great options and if you want to use the free version it gives you tons and tons of options gutenberg gutenberg i don't know if you saw my interview with wp tonic last week where we covered a lot to do with gutenberg on that in all honesty gutenberg is so slow in development i mean you consider that's been out there for three years now and gutenberg is only becoming a usable tool for anything beyond just creating blog posts by the fact there's a growing third party market that's kind of bolstering the lack of functions and the big gaps that that actually has in the tool set that gutenberg brings to the table so gutenberg is a the other two like i say it all depends on what you're looking to do um i don't think there's a winner or a loser i think it's just in case you're the right tool for the right job hope that answers anyway so good evening to a few more people coming in my rook i always said that that correctly good evening to you glad you could join in tonight thank you very much for joining uh you're a gentleman like i said i'm not bothered about paying for it it's not a problem in the test i'd just like to have a chat about the direction the future the ideas that you've got things like that so like i say i'd be interested to have a chat and i'm sure that uh the stratos would be exactly the same so just reach out let's have a chat let's uh let's get a conversation going stratos i was waiting for a better t-shirt something with dune perhaps i've not actually seen dune yet so i can't comment on whether i want to buy a t-shirt on it we'll have to wait and see but you never know good evening jim thank you very much for joining us good to see you in tonight kyle come on now text on a curve most useless update ever i think we could probably find a few more that are a little bit less useful anyway um tim any word on whether elementor will ever integrate custom loops apparently it's on the list of things to do obviously not very high up on the list but it is on the list apparently so will we ever see it i'm sure we probably will see it will we see it anytime soon i'd like to think so but i'd also like to think that we could get a full complement of tools to complete that woocommerce uh functionality um and we probably will at some point just don't know when some fingers crossed but yeah i'm sure we will see it i just like i say it's a case of when will we get it uh okay let's have a little look are your boy why are you not creating videos on freelancer friday anymore can you create videos about business i have no idea what you're talking about i'm sorry video boy i've never actually created videos on uh oh sorry freelancer friday sorry i do see you coming for now it's later than normal um i probably will be doing things like that but i don't know when or how often for anybody that doesn't know the freelancer fridays were a video that i released funnily enough on a friday that were kind of more focused towards the business aspect of being a freelance designer or being a small agency or a small web design company and it's kind of one of those things that can be very subjective but again if you were at the beginning of the the stream i kind of alluded to the fact there's a few other things in the pipeline in the near future to do with live streams to do with things like that that i think a lot of people will be interested and i think this is one of those things so it's not going to be specifically a freelancer friday but it's kind of going to have certain aspects that will focus around that aspect of things so keep an eye on the channel keep an eye on the live streams because there is something in the pipeline and i'll say no more about it but i think it'll be interesting okay [Laughter] should make a video with the most useless updates possible that elementor could implement i thought i'd been doing that for the last couple of months with the updates they've released but obviously not anyway sunriser good evening to you and web pro's marketing hi from sur america good evening to you parent pj good evening crew and paul from johannesburg good evening johannesburg i hope you're all doing well and you're all safe out there um okay let's have a little look excuse me i'm just taking a look at the different comments that they come in um let's have a look kyle i need a tab shirt do you know what to do sir you know what to do hit me up and i'll i'll sort at a design crate inspire one for you and then we can all all just cross promote each other again like i said if anybody that doesn't know kyle from the admin bar has the tab tab so once you finish this stream head over to facebook and join up to that because uh it's a great community of really nice people okay i like the new setup thank you very much so do i it's really proven to be incredibly incredibly useful and like i say so nice to just be able to come out do what i need to do with everything set up and not have to worry about tearing things down afterwards which does get to be a bit of a pain in the behind okay so before we go any further if you're enjoying the live stream and you enjoy being part of what we're doing around you please hit that thumbs up button on the video because it tells youtube that you actually like the content and help promote it get more people know about the live streams get more people involved we can build the wp tets community so if you could take just a couple of seconds just to hit that thumbs up that would be absolutely fantastic okay um what do we have okay so when you're you're a wordpress developer having expertise in various different things please don't spam the comments unfortunately carl will come down with a ban hammer and you don't want that happen okay does blocky play well with jet plugins doug good to see you in this evening i haven't tested it with the jet plugins but there is integration with jet they've got the croco block and um bloxy they've released a i think it's a blog post probably about maybe two months ago now with regards to they've kind of partnered up to make sure that there's the compatibility between those two or between those tools so it should play perfectly well alongside jet engine and just smart filters and those kinds of things so yeah i think if you do a search for bloxy and croco block you should find the blog post that has that information in it and check it out i say it should be fine uh okay what we've got mr gecko i just watched your main wp videos yesterday almost managed a few bigger clients so i did not need it but now i plan to buy it would love to see you use nowadays as well as something else i i still use it to be honest main wp if anybody doesn't know what main wp is it's a way of managing multiple different sites being able to update them back the map on various different things like that it's a free tool there are some uh pro add-ons you can use for it but the video that i released probably about a year ago now maybe a little longer than that that doug is kind of referencing that was all with the free tools so you can combine this with uptime monitoring with a free service backing up your site uh migrating your site there's lots and lots of things in there so i still use it i still think it's a great setup and i would still recommend it it's still one of those setups that is really easy to configure and allows you to do a lot of things with it so yeah i still recommend it doug and if you haven't tried it out give it a try uh okay sandor talking about elementor i have the pro version with a thousand licenses but also on a lifetime crocodile license should i keep elementor pro well that really would come down to your use case i mean if you work with clients and you build websites with elementor pro then you can either hand off the licenses so they can maintain the license themselves or if you do this through so like a care plan or a maintenance plan um but to be honest because you were probably grandfathered into that i'm assuming 99 every year if that isn't something that's too painful in the pocket then i would say to keep it going because that's pretty much what i'm doing i use elementor for a couple of things but even moving away from it i have clients that use elementor pro as part of the their ongoing website maintenance so for that side of things i would need to keep that license it's easier doing that than handing it off to your client because it's it just becomes a bit of a pain then for them to manage and maintain things and when things go wrong and you know the license lapses they come back and generally blame you for for the inability to keep track of those kinds of things so i would say if you can afford to do it i would keep it uh but if it's a case of one or the other then you'd have to weigh up which one would be the best for you moving forward whether crocker block covers all the things that you need it to and you don't have a gap in that tool set that requires elementor pros features so i couldn't say yes or no either way it's really it's really up to you and you and your kind of workload thing uh okay carl totally different thing are these displayed pictures no they're not they're from etsy they are um understanding is that they're sort of zika prints so you can get them various different sizes and then they're just some cheap ikea frames uh if you do a search on on etsy and just do a search for star wars prints you'll find there's quite a few different variations of these and obviously if you're going to do it you've got to get the original trilogy not the new ones which are okay but wouldn't want to put posters on your wall so but you're not the only person to ask that there's lots of people ask the same kind of question about these they seem to get a lot of attention so yeah infinite designs the office looks nice paul thank you very much much appreciated okay gotta go kyle take care and i should speak to you very very soon okay ooh boy serious plugin is a great item for elementor and does what elementor should do there's a lot of great add-ons for elementor that that should that fill gaps at elementor don't fill uh i agree uboy steroids does have a lot of nice useful things in especially the flex model um which just allows you to align things so much easier using that the flexbox model options in there so yeah if anybody hasn't tried that do a search ruby steroids it's a free plug-in there's some really good options inside there and it opens up a lot of extra options to make positioning and things like that a lot easier inside elementor which is still a little lacking in various different places okay i'm going to just go ahead and just go on to the next topic because i'm conscious of the fact that we're already half an hour in and i've only covered the one topic and we've talked a lot well i've talked a lot all right we need an affiliate link paul for what so manage wp uh or main wp i don't know if i've got one um i'll have a look at some point okay so the next thing i kind of want to talk about because we kind of seem to go back on to the likes of you know elementor and things like that is the page builder kind of the way that these are being developed in different ways so for example if we take a look at the video i released today covering the update of elementor 3.5 the beta version at the moment but these are going to be coming out generally in a couple of weeks you can see there's a massive difference in the way that the likes of elementor is being developed in relation to tools like oxygen or like bricks and things like that and i've kind of found it interesting to see the different approaches that these different companies have i mean a company like elementor which is obviously a much bigger company than the likes of brix which is i think it's three developers involved in it maybe four developers so it's quite a small uh kind of product with a much smaller budget probably like elementor was five years ago when it started prior to the the pro version coming out but one of the things you kind of see is how different their approach is to the community okay we could argue the fact that elementor being such a big beast now with like 10 plus million websites running on on elementor free and pro that it makes it more difficult to kind of handle these kinds of things but i still think there's a lot to be said about how you interact with the community and how you look at moving your product forward one of the things that i really like about bricks and i've said this before in different live streams and i've said this in different videos and interviews and things like that one of the things i like about bricks is the fact that they ask the community they take feedback from the community about features that are coming out that people need you know different things like that but what they do then is they obviously take on board they're involved in the community they're feeding back to that community base and they're taking the things that make sense and integrating those into the platform if they've done something that doesn't make sense they've gone back and changed things if you look at the original version of bricks that shipped with a very different way of creating your layouts and they changed that because they've the community feedback on the initial release was that it just wasn't the right way of doing things so they took that on board and went back and rebuilt from the ground at that particular part of the builder and i like that kind of openness to the community to listening to mistakes that you've made and i think if you look at a tool like elementor i think they could take a lot on board from that openness would we want them to integrate every single option that everybody asks for no obviously not that would kind of be a bit crazy and we'd end up with such a hodgepodge of a strange kind of page builder it would probably become useless but i also think there's a lot to be said for when people are talking about the things that they need to get the job done that gets listened to and i'd love to get your thoughts on this i mean if you look at page builders it's a very tribal uh attitude about people when they buy into a page builder if you get people like myself or people that have bought like they've got oxygen and they've got bricks and they've got elemental and all those kinds of things then you're kind of you have a more open opinion to things you're open to these shortcomings of these various different tools whereas you two tend to or do tend to notice that when there's an individual uh that only owns one of those that they've spent their money on and they maybe build their business around they can become very tribal about that and very defensive if anybody says anything negative about that particular tool they jump on them and defend it to the hilt and i think that's a bit of a a sad situation to see because i think no matter how good a product is no matter how much money you've invested into it you still have to understand i think you still have to be open to the fact that it's not perfect you know there are there are ways this could be improved and not everybody you know it might be the perfect solution for you but then the next person that does they work in a different way or deals with different clients different projects there could be barriers in that that product that make it almost unusable for them or problematic and i think you know developers need to be more open and i think elementor take out the i'll talk with the elemental community more than i think i'm probably the github as well if you look at the community there is a real lack of people from elementor itself being in there i'm not talking about people like verdi and stuff like that who are moderators and they've kind of become part of the elementor team i'm talking about people that are inside elementary stuff and i've been inside elementor itself and i would just love that to see them be a little bit more open i mean ben um ben pines who is leaving was left elemental now was a very different uh i had a very different involvement in the facebook group early on in its life cycle and he kind of faded away into the background a little bit and i kind of felt that that was really a bad thing to have happened because you need you know they've got like over 100 000 people involved or there are members of that group active i wouldn't know if we said ten thousand but that you become a faceless company then and i don't like faceless companies i like people that are that are part of the community that listen to what's going on listen to what people are struggling with take it on board feed it back and then you know make the product better and i can't see and this isn't limited to specifically only elementor so don't think that i'm only picking on elemental you can look in other groups like the oxygen group and things like that they can be people that will defend that to the hilt regardless of any shortcomings that may have you know i just miss that openness and that involvement and i think at the moment and hopefully this will continue on that if you look at like the brics group there does seem to be and several of the developers are actually involved in that community listening interacting helping answering questions giving feedback and i think that changes not only the landscape but your perception of the company and the people behind it so what are your thoughts on this because i'd love to get your feedback on this kind of thing because i find it interesting and frustrating in equal amounts so giannis has brought about a good point why do you believe bricks needs three to five people to develop and support one element in these dozens because the user base is so much smaller at this point in time if you consider the fact that elementor has 10 000 in stores and we have no idea at this point in time what the breakdown between the free installs you know active free installs versus versus the pro i can imagine there's probably quite a big split in that in favor of the free version but if you look at that that you have to increase exponentially so there's going to be a lot of people that are looking for support and that's just the facebook group if you take the facebook group out of it you look at people that actually use this and probably go straight to the support side of things then you can see why they would need so many people involved in it because it was just a such a large user base whereas um if we said i'm not really sure at the time of writing this but let's just say for example that you've got 10 000 active uh installs or active license holders for bricks because bricks at the end of the day only has the pro version there's no free version so that immediately cuts out a lot of potential questions being asked because you're never going to get as big a user base as when you have a free product that does a lot and a pro product that that adds more to it when you just have a pro product then there's a barrier to entry for people that that maybe won't be making money out of their purchase so i think there's there's an influencing factor there i think that's part of why um but yeah i think it's just to do with the absolute numbers that are going on with it and elementor is a much more mature product with a lot more features a lot more things included in it which means there's more potential then for problems moving further on down the line so i think that's probably part of the reason why uh yeah so to go back carl yeah fanboys but the thing is it's a little bit infuriating because it does nothing for the actual community all you do then is you have a lot of sycophantic people that say everything is amazing when all the developers then get is this sort of everything is amazing attitude when the reality is there's just lots and lots of scope for improvement and fulfilling you know or fleshing out the entire feature set of something you've implemented things like that so yeah i mean and to to talk about feature sets and to give you a comparison of my feelings with regards to different things like this and about half features and things i would much prefer it when companies are bringing out features that they wait to bring up the full feature set let me give you an example i've ragged on woocommerce so i've arrived on elementor when it comes to the woocommerce because they gave us archive pages and single product pages then they brought out like two years later the ability to do the um cart checkout and the my account and if you saw my video on that i really wasn't particularly impressed because at the end of the day those three features are basically just skinning what's already there as part of wordpress there's no real customization options other than colors and fonts however on the flip side of that i really wish bricks had done the same kind of things i'm saying element i should have done because they brought out the first two parts of uh the woocommerce customization and again the archive pages and the single post pages and we're still waiting for those other features for the extra three parts you know the cart the checkout and the my account my account not so important in all honesty but the car and the check i think they're integral parts to customizing the whole woocommerce experience so i wish they would have just done the same thing and waited and brought all of that out in one go because i think the big gaps in between all that kind of does for a lot of users is stops you from using that feature because it's only half of the feature that you need you still then drop back into the normal woocommerce or you have to use a third-party plug-in in the likes in the case of elementor to be able to customize those aspects of it so i don't like the half feature being released and then waiting for the next half of it to come out and it's dripped out in in smaller parts so if anybody's listening to this kind of thing from any of these page builders please just bring out the full feature set if it takes longer we would rather it take longer and have everything we need to be able to go all in on that feature than having half of it and only being able to use a small portion of what is coming in the future that's my opinion anyway okay so what else do we have toastmasters new zealand north uploads that's a heck of a name uh my cue they're actually defending their own decisions when they get tribal i absolutely agree they're defending the money they've spent on it but the thing is like like i say it doesn't improve the product you just inflate the ego of the developers and give them no reason to keep pushing and innovating and i think again i've sort of said about elementor not innovating since version two came out and i think that in a lot of ways still holds true there's some nice extra features have been brought out but the innovation i think stopped when they brought out the dynamic side of things and the templating system or the theme templating system those were game changers in how you use page builders like elementor and since then i can't see anything that has come close to that level of innovation that they brought out with that and how it all worked because they just made the whole process really really easy so i just think they need some innovation and i think people blowing smoke up their proverbial is not going to help them push forward and i think you just kind of ended up with a mediocre product that never grows because you were just holding it back by making everybody think inside that company that everything is rosy when the reality is people want more so um did i notice that the latest elementor pro broke a lot of sites using third-party plugins i didn't but in all honesty i don't really go into the um the elemental facebook group very often these days because it's not the place that it used to be it doesn't feel anywhere near as open and as welcoming and i yeah i don't really go there very often so i don't keep up with the people that are having problems but it doesn't surprise me because at the end of the day this is the same story that whenever a update to elementor rolls out you know i can't blame elementor for this all the time it's not always their fault you know the third party plug-ins that are not doing what they they need to do to make sure it's in in line and compatible with the new version of elementor as it releases so we can't always give elementor the blame on this one but it's the same story i think all the time whenever an update because especially a major update you're always better off waiting for at least three or four uh minor revisions which normally roll out over a couple of days that will rectify those initial problems and obviously you have third-party companies will roll out updates to accommodate the issues that have arisen from those problems but yeah never never ever update elementor on a a major revision wait for those minor revisions to come out so three point five one one three point five two those kinds of things um yeah let's have a little look so one of the reasons why i like croco block good support on topic's personal solution i think croco blog are doing a good job because i think you've got quite a few people that that are active in that community and again you know it's not an easy job i can imagine it's really difficult when you've got people that are moaning about your products broken something and when you've got any kind of product that has a lot of complexity and this includes tools like elementor there is scope for problems in writing because you can change something a small piece of code some way that has a massive knock-on effect that you just did not envisage happening and all the testing in the world would not find that out so i really feel for the people that have to do that in any of these kind of communities but i do agree that when it comes to the croco block community you've got several people in there that are already known for being helpful including the ceo is involved in the comments and things like that and again like i say i think that that helps improve the personal ability of the company you you're not a face this company that just literally does what you need to do and you have people sending things off that are like moderators and things you actually have people from your company that represent your company involved in that community aspect the community is massive the community is a massive place and with the likes of facebook and things like that that's an important aspect of your business and something that should never be overlooked so yeah i think that's definitely a thumbs up for the croco block side of things um okay joy i think it's a big problem for many go from a company to a corporation in some mental ways then you take a step then you go a step from your end users i agree you know you you kind of once you lose that touch with your user base and you lose that personal uh link that you have there then i think you you potentially alienate customers because especially the ones that have been there from the start i mean you've got to consider the fact that like for example with me i created my first elementor tutorial before elementor pro came out probably close to six years ago and obviously the community was small the number of people that were involved in elementor was a small group of people and you knew those people you know on a personal basis but you knew the names like yoni luxembourg for example who's the the head honcho over at elementor ben pines and several other ones they were all names that you knew that when you posted something up on twitter they would retweet or they would share or they would like and you had that little level of interaction with those names and and sort of people but that stopped probably three maybe four years ago and i think that was a detrimental thing for the likes of a company like elementor you know you need to keep those those links with the people that are involved with your product the people that that helped you have the finances to get to where you are today by buying into your product when it was still in its infancy and didn't really have an awful lot going on with it you know there's there's a lot to be said for for supporting those people and being involved in that that social aspect of things so yeah i do agree joe okay uh let's have a little look janice i have elementor pro and bricks unlimited i have never uh chatted in the elemental facebook group i have a couple of dozen posts in bricks facebook group i think that broadly that's not random no like you say i mean at the end of the day bricks is not going to be the be all and end all you know bricks is still a very new product you know no one's saying that for every use case you could just drop the likes of elementor in favor of bricks but what bricks did was it came out with a lot of really solid options that people wanted and i think give it another year maybe 18 months to mature and i think anybody that bought into that um that lifetime license they're still running that i think you would be happy that you did that because i think it's definitely one that's going to keep on growing and i think it's going to pick up market share to the point the same as elemental not unless they go down the venture capital side of things or they change something about their business model because i don't think they're pushing it as hard as elementor did and does know because i'm sure that every time you go on to youtube you'll probably see at least 10 elementor adverts pop-up i know i do so you know there's different budgets there's different positions in the life cycle there's pretty different end goals for these different companies but that's fine i mean brix doesn't need to be a 10 million strong installation if it had if it ends up in two years time it's got half a million that's still a pretty respectable user base because all those half a million people paid for that product so they've got a vested interest in that product being better and as long as they keep listening to the community talking getting feedback taking things on board learning and creating creating a product that actually we want and not stuffing it with things that we don't want which fingers crossed hope they don't go down that route because i think that would be really sad to see that happen so yeah and you know it's it's still very early in its lifespan but also you've got to kind of consider the fact that there's also a lot more third-party plug-ins that'll that'll do things with elementor that you can't do with bricks and you can't do with elementor without that plugin there's also a much broader range of tutorials and support and help and articles and things on when it comes to elementor so there's a lot of things that surround elementor that brix doesn't have yet and hopefully bricks will have that uh charlie bird do you have an affiliate for bricks no i don't they don't have an affiliate plan they did talk about it but nothing's actually come out about that for well since the original talking about it so no but i would still suggest go and grab it if you don't already have that lifetime deal because i think you will be happy you got it in six to 12 months time i think it's gonna be it's gonna be up there as a really solid product i think it's gonna go down probably more down the the path of beaver builder which is more about creating a solid product that does what needs to be done for professionals and not necessarily becoming the mass consumer page builder for everybody which i think is the direction that elementor is going in right now uh okay so we're going to do a couple more questions i've got about 10 minutes and then we're going to gonna wrap this up a little bit okay you're right about innovations and in all fairness elementor should just acquire crocodile not that i think it would happen or should happen i really hope they don't acquire croco block because i want croco block to move beyond elemental i want croco block to move more towards and it pains me to say it more towards gutenberg because i think when you've got a product or products like a lot of the tools i'm talking more like jet engine and jet smart filters than like the menu things and things like that i think those products would be better off not relying upon elementor making them kind of agnostic so you could use them through short codes or various different methods because i think if elementor acquired them i think it would dumb them down and it would restrict what they could do because obviously there's a massive overlap between what croco block create in their suite of tools with elementor pro and the sad thing is to do something like that they would have to strip a lot of that out to just leave the basics for things like jet engine and that and i think that would just be too much of a re-engineering feat so i would rather see them move away and go to working more with gutenberg than working with elementor and i said that for quite a while i'm glad to see that like the jet forms and jet search and jet smart filters and jet engine can be used to pretty much the same level without the need for elementor that's a good thing in my books uh okay let's have a little look what else we have look i stopped pushing elementor and elementor pro in main wp a long time ago i can understand why uh yeah i totally agree norway we don't want elementor to acquire croco block now if elemental won't acquire or at least grab the plugins for like dynamic visibility you know those kinds of plugins so we could actually have those conditional logic options inside elementor that would be a good starting point but no not not croco block definitely not proper blog okay did you know okay bear with me a second have you been to the elemental forum for not lately have i been roasted in here again surprised no i haven't um i oh the forum sorry i do apologize uh yeah i've taken a look at it and i was part of the sort of the beta testing with regards to that but again i i don't know it's i struggle where you go to places and everybody is how amazing something is i mean maybe this is just the sort of the the british aspect of me that that nothing can ever be that perfect and when people are saying how perfect everything is i kind of just get a little bit sort of yeah this is not for me you know i want i want companies to be pulled up on what they're not doing right and help them make better products you know those kinds of things so i've been there a couple of times but again it's to me it feels like it's just a way of um having more control over the message that's been portrayed by the people that actually write content in there you know people post and things like that and i think that's a bad thing if i'm honest i think it's a bit sad uh okay so we're going to do two more questions and then i'm going to call it a knight okay all over all by far my favorite tutor for dynamic wordpress plugins but there's one thing i'm still missing from you detailed tutorial about acf pro in combination with acf extended i do need to go and take a look at acf extended there are lots of different uh features inside the that do look interesting i will agree with you a hundred percent on that this is something that we i'm looking to move away from the reliance upon page builders and take a look at the kind of tutorial that i'm talking about look put together this week about using uh like the bloxy theme acf those kinds of things this will be part of the whole process is taking a look at what other tools are out there that help us expand the functions that we have in these plugins without the reliance of page builders so i will be taking a look at it in regards to what aspects i'm not 100 sure because it is a pretty massive plug-in that extends acf but i will definitely be taking a look at some of the things that that offers over the next you know probably next year now because there are a few life things that are going on at the moment that that will take my focus away from things uh around the sort of christmas and a little bit beyond there but i will be taking a look at that in some point in 2022 so i will be doing it but thank you very much for the kind words about being uh your favorite tutor with the dynamic content um okay uh okay let's have a little look chris says what's your thoughts on where guttenberg is headed right i'm not gonna go into this too much because uh if you don't know i'll be on a live stream with um croco block on friday this coming friday and i think i think that's the same time as tonight i think it's about 8 p.m or 9 p.m uh gmt um so i will be talking more about guttenberg and what i think of that on there but where do i think it's going briefly uh without the support of a lot of other plug-ins down the drain because it's just it's just been propped up by third-party companies you know there's so little you can do with gutenberg itself and again this goes beyond just creating blog posts which is kind of what it's fine for i think they should have spent a lot more time working on that i think they should have definitely employed a company that has a track record in working with page builders or maybe even bought one out and take the staff from the onboard to create something new but i think the way that it's kind of built at the moment i just don't see how it's getting better anytime soon we need third-party plugins to do just the rudimentary things inside there yes they've taken a step forward with some of the things like now we can start to work on the loop and we can start to move towards full site editing but they're giving us full site editing before they've actually fleshed out the whole basics of gutenberg so to me it's like well you've taken three years to get to the point of where gutenberg is right now now you're introducing full site editing in another three years time where are we going to be because now you've kind of got two different aspects of the process to work on whether it's two completely different groups of developers being involved in this i don't know or whether it's just one large group but it doesn't seem like a recipe for success it just feels like gutenberg was a case of we're trying to keep up with the likes of wicks and things to make it easier to create simple content and simple layouts but people want more than that and i think this is one of the problems you've got when it comes to gutenberg so that's my kind of take on that one uh vodka i would say you'll probably be right in most cases with that one yeah i would say that the main reason why i mean what was the theme that elemental brought out probably about two years ago and that one basically died off after the space of well i can't remember the last time i heard anything about it other than someone asking about it the other day saying whatever happened to that particular theme so i think this is yeah a lot of companies will buy other companies to kill them off i mean you really look at uh well there's quite a few different companies in apple are notorious for doing this kind of thing bringing a company out and taking a small portion of the technology and adobe's another one for this when they bought macromedia you you look at what's left out of macromedia i think we've got dreamweaver that's probably all that's left out of it because everything else has basically been killed off so i would agree i think it would be bad names for most places to be bought out by elementor at this point in time um dirk you are right there are third party add-ons for bricks coming out just not as quick as we've seen or we've seen with elementor i mean elementor's got a really big third uh third-party ecosystem that make a good living out of you know developing those those plug-ins and things like that bricks to get that ecosystem needs to have a bigger user base therefore more potential for companies to start making third-party products for it to expand it and then make an ecosystem that sits around it so i think we're a ways off from that just yet if you take a look at oxygen for example it took them until version three to realistically start to get a third-party ecosystem starting to create products around them and they're still quite a small network of companies creating third-party products for oxygen so i think bricks is probably gonna be very similar in the fashion that it will come but not for a while yet um janice brixton incorporated the usage of tool set they also have acf and metabox do you believe they would think about croco block as well um i can't see why you probably couldn't use croco block in a lot of cases now anyway because you can use that with the gutenberg side of things but look never say never i can imagine at some point they're going to support it because i look at the other day there's a couple more companies have now started to support jet engine which i think is a good thing because now that's moved away from being solely reliant upon elemental it opens up more possibilities for integrations with third parties like themes like bloxy like additional uh sort of page builders like the likes of uh bricks and stuff like that so i think it would be good to take a look at that and add more integrations to make jet engine and those kinds of things more widespread in its support outside of just the elemental system okay i'm gonna do one more and then we're gonna call it a knight uh i agree as there's no perfect tool that's very very true i'm a huge fan of oxygen but boy they need to improve things yeah i i agree um there isn't a perfect option i mean every different one every different page builder has pros and cons and this is what i kind of say is that there's various different reasons why you'd want to use different ones for different reasons some have strengths in some areas some have strengths in other areas sometimes you don't even need a page builder or theme builder in the case of oxygen so there are plenty of other options out there to do the kinds of things you want doug when was the last time i took a vacation just saying you're trying to say i look tired so you talk about the bags under my eyes yeah i know tell me about it um two years ago yeah two years ago mainly because we can't really go anywhere in this country at the moment and we had a council holidays we were supposed to go into croatia we had flight spoke for that we suppose we can go into where we go in malta how to castle flights for that so going on holidays in the uk is a little bit like taking potluck when it comes to the weather chances are it's going to rain and if you're lucky it won't but most of the time it's going to rain so going abroad is much better so fingers crossed maybe in the next year or so that'll be something but i get the feeling life's going to make me look a lot more tired very soon okay so i'm going to wrap things up here if you don't mind uh actually there's a lot more comments and things there but yeah carl cheek i've been offline for three months yes yes i've been offline on live for three months i'm making that up for that this week and i um okay that's why i should cut the liverpool but it always rains in liverpool doesn't it vodka surely it always rains in liverpool okay so thank you very much everybody for for joining in tonight i'm going to call it a day here hope you've enjoyed the conversation thank you so so much for getting involved thank you very much for being involved in this sort of last minute live i always enjoy doing these kinds of things if you are free sort of on friday please do join in and join me on the croco block um live stream i'd love to get you some of you asking questions and things that we can have a little bit more conversation about the future of the tools like gutenberg and so on but again thank you very much for checking the live stream out thank you very much for joining me tonight please do say safe and well and i will look forward to seeing you all very very soon maybe even weekly with the live streams and that'll make carl happy so if you enjoyed the live stream give it a thumbs up don't forget to give it a thumbs up and take care i shall see you all very very soon take care you

Channel: WPTuts

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Id: JOY94pi__xk

Length: 79min 14sec (4754 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021