Beaver Themer

February Update – Say Hello to Beaver Themer

Robby McCullough - February 27, 2017

Hey, all! Gosh, the months seem to go faster and faster. We’ve got some really exciting news this month. After over half a year in development, we released an alpha version of our new extension: Beaver Themer! Also, we have an update on our forum and a few plugs and notes. Enjoy.

Beaver Themer is Finally Here

If I were any good at this blogging stuff, I would probably hide the exciting part at the bottom of the post and make y’all read the boring parts first. Alas, I can’t help myself as I am pretty excited to write this bit.

We’ve been hinting that we’re working on our very own extension for Beaver Builder. Beaver Themer is a Theme Builder for WordPress. It allows you to build theme parts like headers and footers. It also allows you to build templates with Beaver Builder that you can apply to all of your blog posts or custom post types (like WooCommerce products).

How Can I Try Beaver Themer?

We are releasing Beaver Themer as an alpha download and, if you’re a current customer, you can access it from your account page.

After the alpha/beta period, we are planning to release a paid subscription for updates and support for Beaver Themer. The price is still TBD. Also, being an alpha, we do not recommend using it on a live site!

How Can I Learn More or Provide Feedback?

Thanks for asking! Justin created a very thorough Facebook post explaining the product and sharing a few walk-through videos. We’re going to try to keep the discussion about the alpha on that Facebook post. For bug reports, please submit a standard support request so they get filed appropriately.

In the future, we’ll publish a beta post on the blog here with more details on pricing, release date, and new features/updates. Enjoy!

We’re Moving the Forum to Reddit

Ever since switching our support system from a forum to HelpScout, it’s felt like there’s been something missing. We tried to fill that void by creating a Stack Exchange forum proposal. Sadly, the SE proposal format is extremely involved and cumbersome.

We asked everyone to help us with the proposal process, and my fear is that, after everyone’s hard work and time commitment, we won’t make it to the next stage. So, we’re going to scrap the Stack Exchange idea and try a Subreddit instead! It’s barren at the moment, but here is the link:

http://reddit.com/r/beaverbuilder

The format on Reddit is very similar to Stack Exchange, but we don’t have to go through any of the proposal rigamarole. So if you see a question come up over and over again on Facebook, encourage the OP (that’s Reddit slang for “original poster”) to put it on Reddit! We’ll start spending more time there as well. The benefit is that all the questions and answers will be indexed and findable by search engines.

Thanks so much to everyone that participated in our Stack Exchange proposal process and I apologize for the false alarm.

Meet Nancy Hildebrandt

Last month, I started a tradition of writing about a member of our community and a member of our team. This month, I want to shine the spotlight on Nancy (in an effort to keep our blog posts relatively short, I think we’ll switch off between our team and the community).

Nancy’s been with us since the summer and she’s been the architect and mastermind behind our new Knowledge Base. Nancy’s also been writing a ton about Beaver Themer. She has a Ph.D. in neurolinguistics and she speaks Japanese. Nancy resides in Oregon and we like to attempt to out do each other with pictures of our mountain skyline views (she usually wins).

If you’ve ever benefitted from our Knowledge Base, feel free to leave Nancy a thanks in the comments.

Beaver Builder + Give Donations Integration

Before I started working at FastLine Media, I used to work for a non-profit and I am really proud to share this next bit. Admittedly, I am totally guilty of the entrepreneurial cliche, so brilliantly highlighted in this video by JP Sears (seriously, watch this), of trying to relate our business efforts to “doing good in the world.”

As much as I try, my friends Mike and Sheryle Gillian of PurposeWP, and our friends over at Give are doing a much better job. PurposeWP’s mission is to help non-profits and Give is a WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to accept donations. PurposeWP released a plugin that makes it super easy to include a Give donation form in a Beaver Builder page. Here is Mike’s take on it…

“We recommend BeaverBuilder and Give to all of our nonprofit clients looking for easy to manage website fundraising. Our plugin is the result of our desire to make things as easy to use as possible for our clients.”

If you’re ever building a fundraising site, be sure to keep these two tools in mind.

Translating Beaver Builder is Getting a LOT Easier

Our friends over at WPML released a really cool new integration. You can now translate Beaver Builder pages using their one-screen translation editor.

A few of the team over there were nice enough to give us a live demo and it’s one of those features you really have to see first hand. If you ever plan to translate any pages built with Beaver Builder, take a minute and check out the video below or see this help article.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4RjUCdOtFk

Footnotes

WPBeginner Page Builder Review

WP Beginner updated their page builder post for 2017 and Beaver Builder is still getting high marks. Woot! We had an opportunity to get to know the man behind WP Beginner, Syed Balkhi, at CaboPress. He’s a cool guy with impressive business acumen. You should check out some of his other products like OptinMonster and WPForms.

BobWP Reviews Beaver Builder

The last time I chatted with Bob Dunn of BobWP, he was tried to talk me into coming out to Las Vegas with him. Needless to say, I like him a lot. 🙂 He recently published a video review/post about Beaver Builder. Thanks, Bob. If you’re not familiar with his blog, it’s a good one!

StudioPress Launches StudioPress Sites

There’s a lot of overlap between the Genesis and Beaver Builder communities. Our friends over at StudioPress recently released a hosted WordPress service called StudioPress Sites. It would be a severe understatement to say I am proud they included Beaver Builder Lite as one of the select few plugins that can be automatically installed on their platform. Woo-hoo!

In Closi… drops mic

I’ve been using the “In Closing” heading to cap off our update posts for a few months now. It feels like a cop out. I should come up with something more creative but, at this point, I am usually tired of writing, lol! Okay, I fixed it.

With Beaver Themer out in the wild, I feel like this post deserves a proper mic drop. Thanks for reading, everyone. Until next month!

26 Comments

Quasel on February 27, 2017 at 10:42 am

Thanks Nancy 😉 – Pointed many users from the FB Group to KB Articles!
Beaver Themer really looks awesome – in behalf of the the Pods.io CPT Team I started already the work on the integration for field connections! – https://github.com/quasel/pods-beaver-themer

Keep up the good work – Thanks!!!
Bernhard
- Diane on February 27, 2017 at 11:08 am
  
  Good news. 🙂
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 9:55 am
  
  Oh, very cool! Thanks for sharing. 🙂
Puneet Sahalot on February 27, 2017 at 10:47 am

Beaver Themer looks awesome! It looks like the future is here, right here.
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 9:56 am
  
  Thanks, Puneet! 🙂
Diane on February 27, 2017 at 11:07 am

Just like your netflix account, it’s okay to share. (I’ve died)
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 9:56 am
  
  Hehe. They’re actually a lot stricter now than they used to be (I know because I just had to upgrade my account 😡).
Colin Cartwright on February 27, 2017 at 12:01 pm

Hey Robby,

Wow, there’s so much good stuff going on. I’m really excited to try Beaver Themer! Funny enough, David Waumsley and I were discussing it this morning, and we think it’s going to be a smash hit.

Having been on this journey with you guys since near the beginning, I have to tell you that you guys are still hitting it out of the park on every occasion you come to bat. It’s nice to see that others are recognizing the amazing things you’re doing and the beautiful community you’ve created. Bravo to you, Justin and Billy for remaining humble and not letting it all go to your heads.

Keep up the great work guys!

Okay, it’s time for to head over to Reddit for the first time in my life!
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 10:32 am
  
  Hey Colin! Thanks for the kind words. 🙂 Hope you’re doing well. Let’s catch up soon (and see ya on Reddit)!
Robert on February 27, 2017 at 12:03 pm

Looks like great news, especially for having all technical details in 1 system, would add great conveniance, and support advantage.

I hope you guys keep the the PRO users in consideration, while adding the price tag. Personally i invested in the PRO version, because of the inclusion of the beaver theme. At the moment the Beaver theme is just enough, but rather simplistic (considered the additional $100).
I knew some day this would be changing, so i’m really exited 😉
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 10:34 am
  
  Hey Robert. Thanks for the feedback. We appreciate it.
- CarlHawkins on March 12, 2017 at 11:06 am
  
  Hi Robert, My thoughts are along the same lines, Theres no doubt that Beaver Page Builder is fantastic, the theme however sort of scrapes by, I have also read that the theme side of things gets left out and doesnt get upgrades as much as it should due to the ever expanding page builder.. I too pay that extra payment each year for the theme in the hope that at some stage it will rival the more complex themes out there, Please tell me if i am incorrect, but i hope that Pro and above users will be seeing this extra theme technology built into their existing subscription as an improved theme and not another bolt on extra that needs paying for.
  
  As Robert says that extra $100 Price tag and then yearly fees for the current theme is pushing it a bit, I for one have paid for this on the thoughts that it will improve over time, but the thought that this may be at an additional expense is concerning..
  
  Cheers
  Carl
Antoine Magnan on February 27, 2017 at 1:21 pm

Can’t wait to use Beaver Themer on my live sites 🙂 BB is such a game changer. Thanks for making my life easier !
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 10:35 am
  
  Our pleasure! We’re thrilled to finally have the alpha out in people’s hands!
Sasha-Shae on February 27, 2017 at 1:52 pm

Hahaha! Nice read, I love the mic drop to not be a cop out hahaha! Also, great too see so many things happening, and more traction to Beaver Builder! Yay!
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 10:35 am
  
  Hmm. I guess that was a bit of a cop out too now that I think of it, lol!
Jay Okey on February 27, 2017 at 4:19 pm

Really looking forward to Beaver Themer. The ability style post templates and connect to custom fields in the BB interface without additional coding is going to be a winning combination.
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 10:35 am
  
  Fingers are crossed over here!
Athlone Harris-Compton on February 27, 2017 at 9:07 pm

I want to congratulate the BeaverBuilder team on the launch of Beaver Themer. It’s fantastic! Well done on an innovative product.

I’m extremely excited about using this in my business and already feel comfortable recommending it to anyone else that builds websites for a living.
- Robby McCullough on March 1, 2017 at 10:36 am
  
  Hey Athlone! Thanks so much. Good to hear from ya. 🙂
Athlone Harris-Compton on February 27, 2017 at 9:10 pm

Oh, and thank you Nancy for all your hard work, I’ll be reading your writing a lot more in future now that Beaver Themer is here.
Justin on March 4, 2017 at 3:55 pm

Beaver Themer for the win!

Awesome job with the customization that is possible with woocommerce. Customizing product pages, category pages, etc. would take hours now takes minutes.

Do you have estimated timeline for Alpha to beta to first release??
- Robby McCullough on March 5, 2017 at 4:27 pm
  
  We’re shooting for May.
Haris on March 11, 2017 at 10:48 pm

I also wanted to say that the themer is super – i have been playing with it for a few days now – it was the missing link to make bb a full editing tool. I ve been a member since almost the beginning and never looked back. Many thanks to you for continuing to offer such great products to us. keep it up!
Olivier on April 29, 2017 at 6:38 am

In my humble opinion, Beaver Themer is just what was missing on Beaver Builder.
With this tool up and running we will have all that we need.
It was a bit frustrating to do everything the way we want BUT for the header and the footer…

One question though. When for 1.0 and how much?

Thanks for your work
- Robby McCullough on April 30, 2017 at 2:56 pm
  
  Thanks, Olivier! Check out this post for the latest release and pricing info:
  
  https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/april-update-join-us-beaver-builders-3rd-birthday/