Reply To: Changes to Header and Site Layout and PageBuilder

We’ve been testing stuff around the Govintranet theme.

As part of this, we’ve got a test network (multi-site) installation set up so that some of the plugins are installed universally (obviously the theme, the HT plugins and other essential plugins like ACF) but some other plugins are installed by the administrators of sub-sites ad hoc. We’ve bought a developer copy of Beaverbuilder (https://www.wpbeaverbuilder.com/) and put in on for people to be able to install onto individual sub-sites to give them a front-end editor.

We’ve been playing with it for a couple of weeks and, so far, it seems to work OK. We’ve installed it on several sub-sites and, using the default page template, it allows you to use a whole range of front-end editing stuff to snazz up pages. But this is a qualified endorsement – we’re not using it in anger yet. But we hope it will meet the needs of a few of our publishing users who feel that they want much more flexibility with presentation. Personally, I think keeping it simple looks better but…the end users always know best. And we’re also fretting a bit about the future of this approach. It might work today but we can’t predict what may happen with upgrades and so on. Beaverbuilder does seem to give you a reasonable exit plan so that the ‘enhancements’ are turned into (sort of) HTML if you switch Beaverbuilder off after you’ve used it on pages.

As an aside, we have the same concerns about our (separate) Windows/LDAP installation (not networked/multi-site) which works like a dream. This one lets you use the same credentials as your AD credentials to access a site, with most users having contribute access but a few being elevated (after initial login) to edit or administer the site. Oh, we’re not going to use BBPress – before you ask.