 Okay, I am Aaron and I'm going to be talking about page builders. There's seven page builders that I'm going to be running through pretty quickly showing you just a basic GUI. But who am I? I am an agency owner. I own a company called Sideways 8 with my business partner that used to have a hat on over there. He's got the hat on. I lead the Atlanta WordPress Meetup with Brett. I've got Dev Meetup that I do in Marietta with Diana. I also lead tours to Israel, which goes hand in hand with those things, right? So Native Atlanta, Atlanta, which is probably rare. How many of you guys are from Atlanta? I say 15%. So that's good. I've got four kids. I don't get a lot of sleep. And I get distracted and I forget. What up? Anyway, so bad joke. I'm doing similar slides in about two hours and it's going to be... I don't have that part in there because it won't be funny because I think most of you guys are going to be in that one too. So each case is different. The page builder that I might recommend or might not recommend, don't just wipe it and say forget about that because there might be a client that needs a page builder but does not need all the features. Something that just gives you columns might be perfect. So don't write it off if I don't say it's amazing. All right. What am I comparing? When I started looking at all the different page builders out there, I saw a lot of them that were page builders that were with a built-in theme. And I contacted some of the developers and stuff to figure out if they have something that's individual, meaning it's not built in the theme, it's a plug-in because I believe in separation of everything. I hate it when I see a theme that has a slider built in because it shouldn't be. So if you have a slider that's built in and you decide to switch themes, there goes your slides. It's a bad concept. I see a lot of the plug-ins themes at Theme Forest. You'll get a theme that has everything built in and it's great. And when the client decides, hey, I'm going to switch themes, all of their contact forms, all of those things are just gone. And that causes serious problems. So I'm a little picky on the ones that I selected because I want to make sure that the content, the page builders stay with the content. So someone is tweeting and I'm getting text messages. This is awesome. Give me. I didn't realize that was coming to my phone. Let me ask you guys, how many of you guys are using page builders? Half-ish. How many of you guys like the ones you're using? Yeah. Some people, eh, it's okay. It's one of those things where it's not something that I wanted to start offering to my clients. But as the clients have gotten bigger and bigger, they need more stuff. And I can't develop everything. My team can't develop everything that we need developed and it doesn't have to, or I can't do it all custom for them. And doing a page builder like they need an about us page, you know, where they can just plop, you know, elements, you know, bios and stuff like that in there. I can't, I don't have time to write all of that code. So page builders. First one here is Site Origins page builder. This is the only one that I'm reviewing that is in the repository, which means it's open source and it's free so you don't have to pay for this one. I think it's, this is going to be a problem. I'll just try to ignore that. So it's free and open source so you can download it, try it, see if it works for you. The way it works, you go download it, install it. Once you install it, when you go to a create a new page, you have a little thing there that says page builder, which that's not that readable. Can we move on with that? We're cool. All right, because I'm not going to be able to fix it. So if you hit the page builder button, that is hard to read. I'm just going to have to go with it though. It wipes out the content box and it replaces it with this. And you can add, you know, different options. You can add a row, which is what I normally do. Most of these are row, you know, you create a section by creating a row and then within the row you create sections, et cetera, et cetera. This one I did a row and I can select, you know, how many sections do I want? Do I want to use the whole 100%, 25, et cetera, et cetera? In here I said, all right, let's do four and then I also added a little text widget. If I click on the second one there, you know, site origin image, it just brings this up and you can select your image using the media library up there. So where it says image file, I just click there. It brings up the media library. It feels very native to WordPress, which is really good for someone that is a new, someone that's new to WordPress or someone that's familiar with it. They don't have to learn a totally different interface. It seems out of all of them it seems like this was kind of baked into WordPress to a certain extent. It feels natural. So in about, I don't know, 60 seconds or so I can build something like this. So it's pretty nice. If you try to do that without a page builder, you're going to be doing div, you know, opening a div, putting this in, you know, closing the div and you're probably going to mess it up, you know, just because it gets, the bigger it gets, the more content, the harder it is to follow. So the page builder has some great layouts, probably about 15 to 18 layouts. So pre-built layouts. So you can very easily roll through these, select one, shows a little more. And when you select one, the first one I selected is the one in the top right, top left, I just made up a word, top left. And once you select it, it brings this up. So there isn't a front end editor for this. So this is all in the back end. So you spend a lot of time going back and forth between this and the front end. So open two tabs and, you know, make a change, refresh. This is what the page looks like once you're built. So it removes header, footer, everything. And it's really good for landing pages. So if you need a site or a page that looks totally different than the rest of the site, this is a pretty quick and cheap way to do it. And these are just some full pages of some of the layouts. So it shows you what you can do pretty quickly and just go in and swap out those images in the text. All right, what happens if you disable the plug-in? It actually keeps the markup there, which is actually good. A lot of the other page builders, it shows a bunch of short codes. And I'll show you that. So that's the review for this one. It's free. It's open source. It builds boxes and holds stuff, which is what I use a page builder for, because I need to be able to move my content around and have it show up in different places. It has the page templates, about 18 of them, I think, might be a little more. And it's good for landing pages, and it's not short code driven. Conductor. I think it is on, yeah, conductorplugin.com. And these people were kind. They donated a copy to me so I can review it. This one is very different than all the other ones. It uses the customizer. How many of you guys use the customizer? The customizer is relatively new in the aspect. I think it's been around for a year and a half or maybe two years in WordPress. Let me know if I'm wrong. Okay. So it uses the customizer. So you go in. They gave me a couple more plugins, and so there's four of them in here, this one and then the ones that say conductor. So it gave me a couple more functionality. Once you activate that, obviously disable all the other plugins, right? I had all seven of them running at once just to see what would happen. What's really funny is that it actually worked in the aspect of they didn't step on each other's toes. On the back end, on the front end, I didn't even look, because I would assume what it would do is try to overwrite. Each one of them would just try to overwrite and whoever is loaded last wins. But I don't know. Anyway, this one's a little different up in the top. You know, I have it highlighted, says conductor. And you see that it takes you to a page and brings this up and you say conduct this page. It brings up the sidebar over here just like the customizer should. And then you start dropping widgets in on the right. You can select your columns, how you want it to work. And then you start dropping widgets in. It gets a little hard on my laptop, on my 27-inch monitor. It's not that big a deal because I have enough space on the laptop, which all these screenshots are taken on. It starts getting squished. So you can't really see what it's going to look like unless you open another tab and refresh and whatnot. This is actually confusing. I got quite confused when I was working on this. The options are pretty limited. It doesn't have page layouts like some of the other ones do. And I kind of didn't like it, to be honest. If you have someone that loves the customizer, then this might be your thing. I feel like it's limiting and confusing. So the Divi Builder. How many of you guys use Divi as a theme? It's more than I thought. Okay, that's interesting. Who used the Divi theme? Do you guys use the page builder that comes with it? Okay. Do you guys use any other plugin with it? I mean, a different page builder instead of the... Right, right. Right, yeah. This is an interesting one. You can get it all on elegantthemes.com. They have a subscription-based thing. They have plugins. And they have a decent amount of themes to choose from. And you don't pick and choose. It's a...you paid their fee and you have access to... I don't know, Adam. How many themes does elegantthemes have? Fifty-ish? Thirty. Thirty? Okay. Nonetheless, they have two real popular ones. Divi is the most popular one. And they released the page builder at a later date, separated the two, which is one reason that I'm reviewing it. So when you activate it, you have a nice, pretty button. I didn't have to highlight where you go to activate it. You activate it, it brings up this very pretty, flat design. And all of these elements here, you know, add a row, all of these things here allow you to customize it. So if you need padding on that row, you can do CSS padding. You can apply a class to that row or element. And that's true for just about everything you put in here. If you need to customize how much spacing that's there, you can do it. Correct. Yep. Well, probably 99% of them. I'm sure it breaks on something. But yeah, you're not limited to elegant themes. So just like the other ones, you can select, do a full row, use 25%, whatever. Cool thing is once you select, let's say you select, I forget what I selected. I might have done a full row. But once you select what you want, it brings up, I had to shrink this to make a screenshot out of it. But it allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff, like an accordion, blog. I mean, it goes on and on and on what your possibilities are. It's almost overwhelming if someone's not familiar with WordPress. So if you have a client that just needs the basics, this might not, this might be overkill for them. But I'll explain that in a minute because you can limit those things. So I selected blog here. And so we can, on this page, we're going to display the blog. How many posts we want, which categories we want to show up. Up here, if you need to apply padding, spacing and whatnot, or if you want custom CSS in there, you can just plop it in. So there's the blog. Pretty simple. But you can put your sliders in there and things like that. So it's very flexible. There's also the layouts that you can do. So it has, I don't know exactly how many, probably a decent amount. I don't know, let's say 15, sure. Different, I really don't know. In fact, if you want to at four o'clock, I'm going to go through that so you can see how many we have. But there's a lot of different layouts we can load. Our team, select that. It builds all of these boxes for you with dummy content in there so you can go in and just swap the boxes out. So really good for landing pages. So if you're looking for something, a page that looks unique, this is a good tool. It looks like this. So this looks like that. Please ignore these horrible bars. That's my screenshot software. It just likes to put those in there occasionally. So you'll see them in the rest of my screenshots. But within less than 30 seconds, you have a page that's very custom. Alright, if you disable the plugin, this is not good. This is what you get. So some of the other ones, they're the same way. It's very short code driven. So this one is short code driven. So if you decide to disable the plugin, you find something better. You know, you are, your content is going to look like this. So it's one of those things where if you want to move from one theme to the next or plugin to plugin, you're going to have to go back and reformat. You're going to have to activate the plugin. Probably copy the content once the plugin is activated and then reformat everything. So, you know, make your decision. And once you have decided to use Divi, stick with it. Yeah, does it grab the content? Does it grab the content and strip that out? Tell you what, if we have time, I'll look at it. So, okay, I didn't see it, but I could be wrong. I'm sorry? It didn't before. It didn't before? Okay. Okay. Okay, I'll look at it. So, and when I do this talk in Jacksonville, I'll make sure I know that. So, um, so here's one thing that I think is really cool. I kind of like separation of things, but this is kind of cool. If you want to limit it, so like I said, if you have a client that is, can't handle these many options or you don't want them to have a slider because sliders are stupid. You know, disable that and you can do it per role. Role meaning, you know, editor, administrator, et cetera, et cetera. So, subscription base, you have to buy the subscription every year for updates. It lets you build things that hold stuff. It's got templates. It's good for landing. It is short code driven. And Themify Builder. Themify Builder is ThemifyMe.com. They have a, I'm sorry, Themify.Me. They have a theme and then they also have the plug-in. You can buy, they probably prefer you buy their theme and then get the builder. I don't like to do that. So, this is slightly different. This will probably mess up a client. They'd start typing content in at the top and not, you know, wonder why it's not showing up or something like that. But it's down here. And I'm going to kind of fly through some of these just so I don't run out of time. So, it's very similar though. You create a row. You create boxes. You select your image. And you can put it in there. So, very similar to the other ones. I have image, image, image, text. And it looks like this. And then down here, switch to front end. You can do it all on the front end too. So, you can more or so see what you're doing real-time. So, if you click and edit this, you know, you can change how many rows you want and stuff like that. As layouts. Hey, I've got water. Give me one second. You click layouts here. Then you have a bunch of different layouts you can use. And on the front end, it looks like this. I'm sorry, on the back end, it looks like this. And then you can see it on the front. And it looks like that once again, ignore the black bars. So, but it just shows you, you can build something pretty quickly, pretty flexible. You disable it. Weird. So, I don't know where they're storing the data, but it's almost worse than short codes. Maybe. I don't know. At least this doesn't look broken. I think short codes make it look like it's broken. So, there's Themify. Subscription base also. I'm sorry. That front end thing. So, subscription base also. You can build stuff. It has a ton of templates. And it's great for landing pages. And it's beyond marriage. The other stuff, I feel like you're married with the plug-in. This one, you're just, I don't know. The spouse is gone on this one. So, I don't know. Right. Yeah, took everything. I lost everything in this. Anyway. So, velocity page. This one is kind of interesting too. It's a little different than the others. Velocitypage.com. You have, it's over here. You hit edit with velocity page. Brings this up. It brings something on the side here, which is unique. It's kind of like the other one that has the, uses the customizer. Everything just kind of stays on the right, on the right. If you hit, oh, you have the, these options here, if you scroll down, there's the page templates that you can go with. There's just a few page templates. Pretty simple. And you build it all on the front end. So, there's no back-end integration. If you try to do it that way, it throws you here. But it's same, same concept. You select how you want the layout to be, and it puts it in. So on this one I did, this one. And so we have this section, and then this. The options are real limited here. So it might be good if your client needs simplicity. That's a good one. So this is editing. This is in edit mode, and this is what it looks like, once you're not in edit mode. And I think you have to up here. Yeah, hit save. So it's a little different. If you disable it, it looks like that. Once again, ignore the bars. But it actually puts decent markup in there. Obviously the image was not one-fourth and smaller in the text on the right, but at least your image is there and your text is there. So simple limited options, and it's the best one when you disable the plugin. So visual composer. How many of you guys use visual composer? How many of you guys like visual composer? I can't figure out how to use it. Okay, fair enough. You buy it on Theme Forest, which... Red, black. So do what you want with that. We, as a company, Sideways 8, we bought a couple themes on there. It is rare. We find something where we think, hey, this is well done. In fact, it's probably beyond rare, but it was the first page builder that I used. And I thought, hey, this is pretty cool, buggy, but it's cool. So you activate it, it brings this up. You have roll management on this one also. Sorry, general settings, roll management. There's design options in there too. So you can set default colors for links and stuff like that, custom CSS. You go and obviously it's kind of taken over the content section. So you can do a front end or a back end editor. I prefer the back end editor. Then it brings up these options. And there are a lot of options, which is good and bad. In this one, I think I just decided to create a row up here and then selected, okay. Yeah, just like the other ones. I did four boxes and then one row for text put in. If you edit the text here, it shows up, brings up this box. It's actually, it's pretty smooth the way it works. Same thing, you put your images in. It pops up. You select from the media library. It seems relatively native to WordPress. Your page looks like this. This is a front end view. So you can do it on the front end and see what it looks like. You'd edit the image here. So if you click here, brings this up. It's pretty nice. You can add padding and whatnot. You can put custom CSS in there, things like that. This is kind of cool. It's got this little dropdown. So you can see what it looks like on mobile. To a certain extent, shrinks the browser basically. And this is what the page looks like when you're finished. If you disable the plug-in, this is great too. So it's very similar to some of the other plug-ins. So once you decide to put all your content in here, you kind of need to stick with it. Or you're going to spend a lot of time going back and fixing or reformatting the content. So it is subscription-based. And it's a six-month thing. So after six months, you won't get updates. You have to go back to Theme Forest. Or I don't know if it's technically Theme Forest, whatever. I'll call it Theme Forest. So you have to go there and buy the subscription. It's really good for landing pages, but you are married to that plug-in once you decide to go that route. So Beaver Builder. How many of you guys use Beaver Builder? How many of you guys like Beaver Builder? I don't think anybody put their hand down. So that's a good sign. Buy it at wpbeaverbuilder.com. When you activate it, it brings up a settings page. And let's roll. It creates... Bear with me, hold on. You have this option here of the regular text editor, or you can use the Beaver Builder, so you're not stuck with using that on every page. When you go... Oh, that's true. When you hit launch, Page Builder takes you to the front end and brings up this window. And you have the option of doing a blank page, which the first time I did it, I built a blank page and I felt a little lost. It's really cool if you're going to get this. The first thing you want to do is probably play with these things because they have some great layouts. This is the blank page. It brings stuff on the right here. The only thing that I don't like about the interface is when I click on three columns or four columns or whatever, I expect it to automatically pop up over here, but it doesn't have to drag it. And I'm constantly forgetting to do that. It's just quirky. Maybe I'm weird, but I just want it to click. I feel like dragging something just sucks up time. Again, three sections. We edit it. We decide to edit it. We can put padding. We can put custom CSS. We can put a class on it, et cetera, et cetera. There's all the advanced stuff for all the padding. I'm going to go ahead over here on the right. I select photo and I have to drag it over, but I drag it over and it pops up this window and select your photo here. It brings up the media library and boom, hit save, done. It has a pretty cool copy feature. The other ones have copy features also, but duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. I decided to drag a separator over and then I put some text in there. So really smooth, really easy to use. And then don't forget to hit save. You can also save this as a draft so I can hit save. And then I go back to the page and none of my changes are saved, but when I go back in, I can open where I was before. Thanks, Kerry. So on the side, I'm going to roll back real quick. On this side here, all of the options that we have are listed here. And it's a ton of options. It's very similar to the amount of options you get with the visual composer and the Divi builder. So you can drop in a blog post in there. So if you wanted to list five blogs in there and you can do an infinite scroll so you scroll down on the page, it pulls in the next five, et cetera, et cetera. It's got a lot of cool functionality like that that if I were to write that or get Garrett back there to write that because I'm not super awesome with JavaScript, it would be time. So this adds a lot of functionality with little cost. Yep. So if we were to take, let's say all the pages on my website be the most boring website in the world, all look like this. I can go and hit save and save that as a module. And then when I go and create a new page, I can restore, not restore, I can duplicate that and have it again. Or for a different website. Yeah, or for a different website. So it's pretty nice. All right, the layouts, click here. It brings up a page layout similar once again. Ignore those bars. But pretty easy to bring in content and build something that's pretty unique looking. If you disable the plug-in, so one of these, I forget which one it was, yeah, the one on the right, if you disable that plug-in, the plug-in, it'll look like that. So you don't lose everything. So it's a pretty clean plug-in. When you buy this, you can put it on unlimited sites. You have unlimited updates. It's a lifetime guarantee. You can build stuff with it, put images in and lay out things the way you want. It's got great for landing pages. And it's not short code driven. And this is the money shot. So here comes the cell phones. Yeah, there we go. So these are listed alphabetically. The way I did them are not that way. But there's just one of them that is free, which is the page builder by Site Origin. So if you're new to page builders, you want to play with one, figure out if it's good, that's something that I would look into. If you're an agency like I own with Adam, the fact that I can use that, the beaver builder on every site I ever touch or someone says, hey, can you help me with this? And I realize, hey, you don't have a page builder. I'll put it on there for you. It's unlimited. So it's lifetime. Lifetime, the screen says it. So Aaron's right. And they might change. The license that I have right now, I know some of them have, they changed their license eventually, but right now that's what their license is. Heck, it might have changed yesterday. I don't know. I'm sorry? Okay, so the pro has, good call, has the, where you can save modules. The agency one white labels it. And you do get the theme. I don't want to white label it because if it's broken, I don't want my name on it. So, I mean, it's true. I can say, hey, it's beaver builder that broke it. You know, it's true. And questions. All right, I'm going to, let me go with you. Good question. I had no idea. I never needed to document or reference it. So, I want to ask my business partner, Adam. Have we looked up documentation on any of these? Okay, so Divi's got a lot of documentation. Beaver builder, I'm not sure. I know Chris Lehman approves, you know, that plug-in. So, right, right. User roles. Are they, does beaver builder support that? Is that the question? I do not know if it'll support custom user roles. I would, I would hope so. Beaver builder doesn't, to be honest. I kind of, I think the way our clients work, I would probably give them full access to everything. Not limit to them to, I know Divi, you can limit, you know, certain aspects of it. I'm a kind of, we give people admin keys, you know, to the site and say, don't, don't break it. And, you know, we have a maintenance plan. You know, we can charge for. So, go ahead, Claudia. It's, it's all done through CSS or applying classes. So, I think all of them have that. And, I'm, Yeah, being, being kind of on the dev side of things, I've probably, I would do it via all CSS. If I understand the question, does it, can you rephrase it to make sure I understand? Okay. Can we, with Beaver Builder, create our own modules? As far, yes. Yes. Back in the back. WP, have I ever played with it with WP, what? NL. No. As you can tell, I don't deal with those much. So. Oh, really? Okay. So, it's supports. Okay. Go ahead. Yeah, no problem. You're welcome. It was fun. It was fun to connect, contact the developers and say, hey, I'm doing a talk. You know, I want to check your plugin out, and they gave me licenses and stuff like that. So, it's pretty, pretty smooth. I mean, honestly, if I were to use one of them, I probably would give them cash, you know, because you want to support the developers. Because I know these people, even the ones that I personally didn't like, I'm sure they spent hundreds of hours in there. And it probably works extremely well for them for their use case. And their clients probably love it. And it was probably built for their clients. So, site origin. Back in the hat, with the awesome hat. So, yeah. Beaver Builder. It's the one I have that I purchased before. Sorry, the question was, which one would I use? I would use Beaver Builder. We've also, we've purchased, because we use, we probably do 80% custom, maybe 90% custom sites, but every once in a while, there's a template that we do, and we build it using Divi. And so, we have access to elegant themes. So, I have access to the Divi stuff. We've also purchased the one that's on the course, Visual Composer, and we have Beaver Builder. And I like Beaver Builder. You know, it's one of those things where the other ones that I have access to are also short code driven. And you know what I think about that. So, anybody else? That was your question? Okay. Garrett, you have a question? Okay. So, to repeat the non-question, the, for the mind. He works for me. So, I can give him a little grief there. But he's totally right. You can make a module, make the change, and kind of saying this mostly for the recording. You can make a change once you save that module and you update that module, it updates it everywhere else it is on the site. So, you don't have to, it keeps things not kind of separate. It saves globally, basically, in the back. What do I have against sliders? And we're finished. I think they're horrible interfaces, sliders in general, because I hate the fact that I see something, and then I've got six seconds to suck this in, you know. Or less? Yeah, or less, depending. And what if there aren't the arrows there? What if they're just little dots? Where are the dots? How does the slider work mobile? I'm a scroller person. If you go to sideways8.com, which you should. It's a long page. And I really like that concept. I think people are willing to scroll. So, it's simple. Any other questions? Yes? It's another talk. So, if I were to use, you talk about using a framework, if I were going to write, the way we work, we have a framework that we've developed with Micah back there. And that's what we use. If I were to go with a framework or something to that effect, I'd use Genesis because it's clean. And I know it's going to be clean. I know it's supported. And the Beaver Builder, and probably a lot of them, would work with Genesis. Where's Mickey? Do you guys know if these work within Genesis? Okay, and you use Genesis. So, you did a talk a month or two ago on it. There's so many things that are mentioned that I've never even heard of. So, it's exploding. Another question. Is this a nice question? Okay, thank you. Thank you.