August Update | It’s a BIG one!

Alright! It’s August and it’s update time. Buckle in because we’ve got A LOT to cover here…

Less and less the case as I get older, but I’ve always been a big fan of August. For one, it’s my birthday month. It’s also my anniversary month with FastLine Media. I’ve been with FastLine for three years and I will be turning 30 on the 24th. It’s pretty crazy how fast the time flies.

As you may have noticed, I like to follow our buddy Chris Lema’s lead and open our blog posts with a story. This month’s going to be a bit different. The story is that we’re killing it over here, and we have so much to announce that there’s no time for a story (even though I have a really really good one). Sorry! Let’s just jump right into the news.. you’ll have to check back in to hear our awesome story! 😉

AMA (Ask Me Anything) on ManageWP.org

Anyone who is familiar with the site reddit has likely heard of an AMA (Ask Me Anything). If you’re not familiar, an AMA is basically like a big, group interview. Anyone can ask anything to the interviewee and they’ll hopefully respond with an answer. President Obama even did an AMA on reddit a few years back. Politics aside, I’ll gladly admit I started using the dash (–) a lot more in my writing after reading it.

Presumably following reddit’s lead, our friends at ManageWP have started doing an AMA thread with members of the WordPress community. You can checkout Nick Haskins AMA here, or Vladimir Prelovac’s AMA here.

They were brave…er, nice enough to ask us by for an AMA, and it’s happening right now! Come on by with your questions: Beaver Builder AMA on ManageWP.

Hiring a Designer

It’s time to light up the bat signal! We’re looking to hire a designer. We’re hoping to find someone, on a contract basis, that can help overhaul our templates and be available for general design and possibly illustration work. If you, or anyone you know, might be interested, please have them contact us!

New Modules

Since teaming up with Favolla, we’ve been able to plow through a ton of new features and modules! We’re super excited to announce that we released several new modules over the last few weeks.

Post Slider and Carousel Modules

The Post Slider and Carousel modules bring magazine style blog layouts to Beaver Builder. Both modules have similar functionality: allowing you to create a visually rich, animated display of your latest blog posts. Both modules also have a content setting tab (aka the loop builder) which lets you to pull content from your posts (and custom post types) based on a number of different criteria. You can read more about both modules on our update blog post.

Menu Module

A Menu Module has been a highly requested feature on our User Voice page, and we’re happy to announce it’s here! This module will render a WordPress menu, and it provides several styling and display options. You could always create a menu “by hand” using Beaver Builder, but leveraging the built-in menu editor will save a lot of time and headache.

As always, you can see all of the bug fixes and update details on our change log page.

Beaver Builder Marketplace

Ever since launching Beaver Builder, the idea of having a marketplace for 3rd party templates and modules just made sense. At first, we decided against the idea because we didn’t know if there would be enough demand/participation to justify the setup time, but given the recent interest from various members of the community, we’ve decided to go for it!

I should mention, we’re still a long ways away from launching the marketplace and we need your help. We’re hoping to get some feedback from the community on the best way to manage and implement a marketplace. If this is something you might be interested in, please checkout Justin’s marketplace post and leave us a comment with your thoughts and feedback.

Custom Module Docs

With the decision to do a marketplace came the decision to open up our custom module documentation. Previously, if you wanted to create custom modules, you needed to have either a Pro or Agency license. For the record, we did this because developers creating custom modules tend to have hairy support issues that take more time on our part to resolve.

Well, in the spirit of having an open system and, hopefully, a thriving community of developers, we decided to release the custom module documentation publicly. You can find them here: Beaver Builder Custom Module Documentation.

Saved Rows and Modules Beta

Okay, this is a real biggie! Soon you’ll be able to save and reuse Beaver Builder modules and rows. Also, you’ll be able to create global rows and modules that can be used on multiple pages, but only need to be updated in one place. If you’ve ever used Beaver Builder on a large to medium sized website, you know how helpful this will be.

Take this example, say you have a Call To Action form on the bottom of all of your pages. Now say you need to make a change to that form. Currently, you’d need to open the page builder on every page and edit each CTA form one by one. Yuck! One can imagine what a chore this would be on a 10, or 20, or 100 page site.

With the global rows update, you can save the CTA form as a global and then you’ll only need to edit it in one place!

We’re super excited about this feature. It’s currently available in our beta versions, and we’d love to have your help testing it out. If you’re ready to get your hands dirty, checkout our announcement blog post for all the details on this feature and how you can help us test it.

Genesis Dambuster

Genesis and Beaver Builder are a great combo. You may remember our good friend Colin’s website, Dynamik Beaver, that is dedicated to tutorials and information on using Genesis, Beaver Builder, and the Dynamik Website Builder together.

Well, Genesis/BB users are going to have another awesome tool at their disposal, the Genesis Dambuster plugin. Genesis Dambuster was created by Russell and Elizabeth Jamieson, and let’s you easily modify your Genesis theme. You can create full width pages, remove headers and page titles, and much more. Thanks Russell and Elizabeth. Nice work!

WPElevation’s 10k Website Proposal

Last, but certainly not least, our friend Troy Dean from WPElevation has some big news and changes on the horizon. They’re completely overhauling WPElevation, and in preparation he is giving away a $10,000 website proposal template. If you’d like to land $10,000 web projects, head on over and get a free copy of their proposal!

Until Next Month..

Okay, we’re finally winding down here. Am I forgetting anything? Hmm, well, we’re doing CaboPress in a few weeks. Super excited about that. We’re also hoping to attend WordCamp US in Philadelphia. Will you be there? Any native Philadelphians out there that can recommend some good restaurants or entertainment?

Instead of begging you to leave a comment, today we’re begging you to come ask us a question. Thanks so much!