Hi there. Hope you’re doing well! It’s cooling off out here and the leaves are just starting to change colors. It’s one of my favorite times of the year.
We’ve got a tasty update on tap. Over the last several weeks, with all of your feedback, we’ve been iterating and improving on the 2.0 Alpha—there are some really exciting new developments (pun intended). Also, we have an announcement to make about the Beaver Builder team. There is some news about Beaver Themer and, thanks to a feature update from Facebook, we have some stats to share about the Beaver Builders Group. Let’s go…
Beaver Builder 2.0 News
Beaver Builder 2.0 is getting very close to being ready and we’re really thrilled. Big changes are coming! Even since our last update post, there have been some MAJOR performance enhancements and UI tweaks. If you’d like to give it a spin, you can jump right into a live demo site here at Beaver Junction’s live demo.
All of Beaver Builder’s settings panels are now rendered via Javascript and this eliminates virtually ALL of the loading and saving time! We also revamped the settings panel design making it smaller, smarter, and dockable! If that’s not enough, we’re introducing a nifty new workflow feature called Instant Save. Settings panels can now stay open and as you navigate between them and your work is automatically saved as you go!
It’s hard to put into words what a refreshing and snappy workflow these new additions combine to create. If you’d like to learn more, head over to the 2.0 Alpha section in our Knowledge Base. If you’d like to see more, take a peek at Brent’s Alpha 4 walkthrough video:
Release Schedule
After watching that, I am sure everyone is dying to know when they can start using 2.0 on live sites, right!? The plan is to move into beta very soon—likely in the next week. From there, we’ll give the beta a few weeks and then launch towards the end of October/beginning of November.
As many have figured out, we like to keep our release “dates” vague to allow us a bit of wiggle room, but at the moment everything is on track. 🙂
New Beaver Themer Integrations Coming Soon
Along with the 2.0 alpha, we also have an alpha version of Beaver Themer available with two new integrations, The Events Calendar and Easy Digital Downloads. We have several articles detailing both of the new integrations in the Knowledge Base. If you have test environments running either of these plugins, give the alpha a spin and let us know what you think! You can also visit David Waumsley’s video walkthrough for more info.
The Team is Growing…Kinda
Brent Jett was a Beaver Builder user long before he started working with us. He was involved with the community and started reaching out to us with great ideas, code submissions, and wacky beaver graphics. Eventually, we offered to pay him and he’s been working with us during his free time.
I am thrilled to announce, in the words of one of Brent’s colleagues, we’re finally “putting a ring on it.” Brent’s going to be joining FastLine Media/Beaver Builder full-time!
I hope you’ll join us in saying congrats, good luck, or god help you to Brent! It’s exciting that we will all be seeing more and more of him and his influence here in the future!
Beaver Builders Facebook Group Stats
For the last few years, the Beaver Builders Facebook Group has become one of the main hubs of our community. Recently, Facebook has added a bunch of new features for group administrators and users (including a much-improved search)! Especially compared to Facebook Pages, Groups have always lacked administrative and analytics tools, so I thought it would be fun to share some of the data.
- Of our currently ~8,600 members, in the last 7 days over 4,400 members were “active” in that they viewed, commented, or reacted to a post in the group. Not too shabby.
- The most active days are Tuesday and Thursday around lunchtime.
- A few of the most popular posts from the last month were a discussion on making a career of building websites, some concerns and thoughts from the community on Gutenberg, and—of course—a debat..er, discussion about everyone’s favorite text editor.
- Lastly, a special thanks to Guy Barry, Satoshi Fujita, Adam Lacey, Bernhard Gronau, Chinmoy Kumar Paul, Michael Miller for being our most active members last month.
Pretty cool stuff, eh? It’s encouraging to see Facebook investing in groups and my fingers are crossed that we’ll see more features that make the group experience better.
Footnotes
Beaver Dojo Podcast
Speaking of the Facebook group, the guy who originally started it all, Mr. Dave Toomey, recently kicked off a new podcast all about Beaver Builder. It’s called Beaver Dojo and you should check it out!
WP Elevation is Taking Sign Ups
It’s that time of year again, our friends at WP Elevation are about to kick off another round of their online program for WordPress consultants. It’s a course/community that teaches how to improve your workflow, business practices & client communication. You can sign up here and grab a free client proposal template (FYI: it’s an affiliate link).
WordCamp US
Justin, Billy, Brent, myself, and possibly a few others from the Beaver Builder team will be at WordCamp US this year in Nashville. Are you going to be there!? Let’s try to link up. Are you on the fence about going? Do it! I hear Nashville is an amazing city and the big annual US WordCamp is always a really great event.
If you can make it a day early, I hear there is going to be a really fun bourbon tasting tour…
Beaver Themer Beginner’s Guide
Our buddy Puneet and the team at Beaver Addons wrote up an excellent beginner’s guide to Beaver Themer. For new Beaver Builder users, they also have a great getting started guide.
Beaver Builder + MicroThemer Integration
The team over at MicroThemer worked some magic to make the two tools mesh really well together. MicroThemer is a visual CSS editor, so the two tools mesh quite well. If you’re using the two together, we’d love to see some examples! Feel free to leave us a link in the comments.
In Closing
Well, with summer winding down we tend to crank up production here at Beaver Builder. 2.0 will be out before we know it. Themer integrations are coming as well. I thought it would be fun this month to invite everyone to leave a comment with what they’re working on with Beaver Builder. Got a project you’re excited about? Let’s see it!
Thanks for all your support. Until next time. 🙂
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So stoked for 2.0. Building a new service completely based around BB and waiting until 2.0 (so my clients don’t have to learn 1.x and then relearn 2.0). These latest updates (especially docking the edit window) are big. Thanks so much for your efforts.
Just curious guys, when can I expect to be able to close my eyes, visualize a layout, and Beaver Builder will build it for me? Because that seems to be the trajectory you’re on!
So I just finished a site (https://wpmh.ca) using a one pager theme but needed to style some interior pages, which is how I came to – reluctantly – test drive Beaver Builder. I say reluctantly, because I had been around the bend with VC, Toolset, CSS Hero, Divi and so on, but nothing ever seemed to work the way I needed it to, so I had given up, and decided to put focus on the hosting and maintenance side of my business, which I’ve been doing for years anyway. Even though I have a programming background in a former life (C, VB, IBM AS/400 stuff) I’ve never been able to take the time to learn PHP and CSS enough to build out from scratch. So I’ve mostly contracted out development, which is just fine, except I’ve always wanted a tool that would give me the ability to build.
You know that “where have you been all my life” feeling? 🙂 I mean people are abnormally excited about this tool! You must love hearing people gush with gratitude in the posts about the new-found creative freedom you’ve provided. Count me among them!
WOW! Awesome update!
Sticky / Pinned settings panel and Auto Save address two of my three main “concerns” with the current BB UI.
Default Content for all modules will “cure” #3 🙂
Can’t wait for the final release!
Hey Lyle! Nice to hear from ya! Good tip. We’ll keep that one in mind 🙂
Congrats Brent 🙂 (partybeaver)
Thanks for the update.
Oh yeah, Beaver 2.0 is looking so cool. Now waiting to roll over to Nov 2017 quickly for the real thing… Beaver 2.0 !
Lately, I have been exploring the power of themer to manage custom data. Seriously, a very powerful development tool – one just have to profoundly use it.
Thanks Beavers!
Davinder, that sounds super interesting! You’ll have to put together a tutorial or explainer or sorts. I am curious to learn more!
Bunch of tutorials and few brand new Beaver Courses – how does that sound? 😀
Looks great, guys! Only problem is the demo site (Beaver Junction demo) doesn’t seem to be working–maybe you knew that already?
Eek, yeah. Sorry about that. We’re going to need to start hosting our own demos I am afraid—we’ve crashed David Waumsley’s server one too many times.
You need wpsandbox.io
I get emails and updates from all sorts of software and apps, but BB is such a joy to use that I actually look forward to any announcement from the team! Keep it up.
Thanks so much for the kind words, John! 🙂
Very cool as always! 2.0 looks super fast and just makes sense from a UI perspective.
Today with a rush build for a large company, working with some advanced accordians using white font…. (maybe you know this sutuation) I was dreaming of this because I was being interrupted, saving, publishing, veiwing, getting confused with about 15 accordians, finding a space error, changing font colors, oops spelled that wrong…… wow! Happy!
Yes! It seems like a minor change until you get an opportunity to see it in action!
BB continues to get more awesomer and even more awesomer!!!
The integration with MicroThemer I’m sure will be awesome. I’ve been using Microthemer for at least 3 years now. I was fortunate to get a lifetime license early on on MightyDeals. I use it on almost every Beaver Builder site. I use it to customize everything that BB doesn’t have an option for.
This one I think has the most MicroThemer customizations on it of all the sites I’ve built with Beaver Builder: http://ripleysmufflerandbrakes.com/
I created a totally separate header for mobile using Microthemer and a lot of customer css classes.
And this one has a fair amount of MicroThemer edits on Beaver Builder as well: https://houstonobstacles.com
Thanks for sharing those examples. They look great!
Congrats guys! These workflow improvements will make Beaver Builder even more of a joy to work with. Very excited about the upcoming release. And thank you so much for the Microthemer shout out.
Thanks, Sebastian!
Looks like an exciting update! Any changes coming for headers, footers, and especially menus?
I am right in the middle of building an EDD landing page, so I am anxious to get the 2.0
Awesome!! Give us save-able ‘groups’ or nestable rows and BB is unstoppable. New UI looks phenomenal!!
I’m speechless watching the BB2.0 video! Looks groundbreaking! Must check the compatibility with my themes… :+1:
Very nice development. I’ve been enjoying playing with the alpha though it was a bit of a transition, what with me being primarily visually oriented 🙂 but once I familiarized myself it was much smoother to work with. Congratulations on this milestone!
I’ve made use of the Microthemer / Beaver Builder blend on a few sites. This one is in the midst of some redevelopment:
https://bargaincentral.ca/
Here’s one based in my old home town:
https://customgas.ca/
This one is just waiting for the go ahead to move to their server:
https://data49.net/audreykurek/
As I’m more code than design it’s a real assist having templates to start from and the visual designing without going live.
Hello. Looking forward to 2.0. You make a great tool. I have to admit I have a great wish in a future upgrade. When I load columns / modules, I wish I could choose which semantic tags used in row and columns.
That default was div element, but i could choose between section, article, aside, header and footer would really be cool. Div element is transparent and I think in the future, semantic elements will be functional for SEO and Universal Design to a greater extent. No matter what you have done so far.
Looks great.
I’ll tell you what would be awesome – in the Setting Panel, instead of having to click cancel, enable the Esc button to do the same.
This important for older people who have the screen zoomed, as the cancel button isn’t always visible
Many thanks
Tony
2.0 looks promising, but does anyone know how it will work with Guttenberg?
Awesome additions. I am also curious to know how 2.0 will work with Gutenberg? There is some indication in recent post of yours but a dedicated post on the matter would be nice.
Thanks! We have something like that in mind… Stay tuned 🙂