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Matthias Böhmichen

8. May 2017 by Matthias Böhmichen

Preview: Elementor Visual Editor for WordPress

Elementor editor pane
Elementor editor pane

If you are doing WordPress for a while you may have seen Visual Composer and some other Visual Editors that replace WordPress‘ classic editor for post and pages. Some of the major WordPress Themes come with their own backend editor like Enfold or “The Arc” which was announces as a Visual Composer Killer. All the aforementioned editor replacements are paid premium plugins and usually have a flaw: they slow down the performance of your WordPress site.

Although they all add value for you as a website owner and speed up the time needed to design a beautiful site – they all harm your sites performance in the long run.

It was not surprising that I was quite interested when I heart of a new visual editor for WordPress – which is both faster and free(!): Elementor – the new kid on the block has been on the WordPress market for 1 year or so and has reached 600.000 downloads at WordPress org within a 12 months timeframe. Not bad.

So I gave it a try on my personal playground at http://www.wordpress-expert.info

The plugin installation files of Elementor consist of approx. 5 MB.Compared to js_composer this is just ¼ th of visual composers 20 Meg needed. After activating Elementor you might want to configure the settings of Elementor first. Like Visual Composer you can define where (post, pages, custom post types) you want to use Elementor and which user roles are allowed to use the Elementor Editor.

A new pages is created and designed as you would do it with Visual Composer: Click Page -> Add new. Set the underlying page template to fit your screen-design (with or without a sidebar)  and choose “Elementor” as the editor of choice.

What hit me right away was the performance of Elementor: Within very few seconds the canvas of Elementor came up and was ready to work with. Wow. This gous in line with the user rating of 4.9 (out of 5) on WordPress.org. Amazing.

On the left hand side approx. 25% of your canvas screen is reserved for the design elements of Elementor visual editor. The editor pane looks well organized and literally needs no manual (there is a help button in the center bottom area). Almost every function and all necessary elements can be found with 1 or 2 clicks.

Two small menus on the top left and right will open the settings of Elementor (left) and the design elements (top right) to be used on the canvas. Great stuff. Still impressed.

Elementor Visual Editor comes with 60 pre-defined Temapltes for your pages
Elementor Visual Editor comes with 60 pre-defined Temapltes for your pages

Elementor comes with a set of 60 pre-defined and ready to be used page templates. Each of them can be imported by a simple click. You might then customize a pre-defined layout which comes close to your design ideas. Not bad.

Bonus: You can save any layout you are working on as one of your personal templates within Elementor– and re-use it later on for more pages to come. Very handy.

Elementor Full Screen Canvas
Elementor Full Screen Canvas

The real work with Elementor doesn’t really feel like work. The cool thing about it: With the editing pane one the left and the preview on the right there’s no more need to toggle between editing and preview mode. It simply is the same. In addition Elementor Visual Editor comes with three viewing options for the page or post: One as it will be seen on desktop computers which is used for designing and is the default view, one view with 768 px is for tablet and a last one with 360 pixels emulates a smartphone. It looks a bit like the preview arrangement in Google Chrome.

Integrated Preview for Tablets and Smartphones
Integrated Preview for Tablets and Smartphones

For designers this is extremely powerful as they can preview their results on all three devices in just one place. Really good job – guys. And I am still pretty much impressed.

After playing around with the Elementor designer for half an hour I could not find a flaw or error nor a bug. During that time I had created three test pages with Elementor. A first template imported from Elementor, a simple page just with small design elements and a last page with larger jpg images in it.

As usual I headed over to Pingdom and tested their speed after my caching plugin had the static page in its internal cache. All 3 pages loaded around a 0,7 to 1,0 seconds while being 1,0 to 1,6 MB in size. Again – pretty good job.

Elementor Speed: Around 0,7 to 1,0 sec loading time for 1,6 MB sized page
Elementor Speed: Around 0,7 to 1,0 sec loading time for 1,6 MB sized page

Elementor as a visual editor seems to be capable not just to replace Visual Composer due to its speed and amazing design concept. I assume there will be some enhancements over time too.

The best thing about Elementor sill is: It’s free and Opensource. Wow.

But I’ll probably be happy to pay 49 US-$ sooner or later (97 for 3 sites, 199 for unlimited number of websites) for Elementor Pro (https://elementor.com/pro/ ) to those amazing coders who brought Elementor to the WordPress Community.

Did I mention that Elementor has the potential to replace most visual editors for WordPress on the market? Stay tuned as we’ll publish more posts and reviews about Elementor here.

Did you already use Elementor? What are your experiences with this new plugin for WordPress? Leave a comment below.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: Elementor, Plugin, Visual Editor, Wordpress

22. April 2017 by Matthias Böhmichen

Best author bio box plugins for wordpress

An author bio box is an important part of a WordPress based website . You can give any author a “face” by showing a foto of him (or her). The author bio box usually gives a brief introduction about the author/writer/blogger and should make it as easy as possible to connect to the author (i.e. email / twitter / facebook) . To quickly connect with any visitor the standard bio box deployed by WordPress is not enough for most website owners. Fortunately there are many free plugins to extend or replace the functionality of the author bio box.

What a good author bio box plugin for your wordpress website should provide:

  • Easy way to update central information for the authors / writer on the wordpress blog
  • The authors image should be either pulled from gravatar or manually uploaded
  • Ideally the bio box provides more posts from the same author
  • The bio box plugin should have more than – let’s say: 1000 downloads on wordpress.org ?
  • An average rating of 4 or better (applies to wordpress.org and themeforest / codecanyon)

Free author bio plugins for wordpress

WP Author Box Lite — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-author-box-lite/WP Author Box Lite — WordPress Plugins Give identity to your blog posts, pages and custom post types! Author Box Lite creates responsive profile and latest posts box to increase reader engagement. This also automatically add google+ profile authorship. Design your wordpress author box to match your theme by simple selecting colors via color picker. All elements are adjustable

Here is how it looked like when I activated.

What I really liked about WP Author Box Lite is that it covered all my requirements like Gravatar Image and related posts from the same author. Although the plugin deserves a better preview image on wordpress.org – I give my thumbs up. Please note that there is also a premium plugin version of WP Author box on Codecanyon which give you even more options to tweek its design.

Starbox – the Author Box for Humans — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/starbox/Starbox – the Author Box for Humans — WordPress Plugins Humans look at beauty more than anything else (as you most probably already know, men and women alike). That’s why you’ll get an Author Box that’s gorgeous to look at and it makes your readers click all the way through to see more about the Authors.
Now, if you have just yourself as an Author on your site, or a super-star team of Authors, you’ll love Starbox. You can choose from the professionaly built themes and landscaping. If you are the super-star type, or want to boost social proof, place your Author Box on top of the page, so that your Human readers will know that they’re reading stuff that a real awesome person has written.

We have used the Starbox Author Bio plugin at one of our main websites (astiga.com) as we published content from many authors. This is how it looks like

Starbox - author bio box plugin
Starbox – author bio box plugin

WP Author Bio  is a bio box plugin that allows you to modify almost any aspect of the boxes design you like. The downside of this flexibility: it looked awful on my blog at first. I had to tune and tweek several settings of the plugin to fit it into my blogs design.

WP Author Bio — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/sexy-author-bio/WP Author Bio — WordPress Plugins The author bio box is responsive and includes five sexy social icon sets to choose from, with support for all the following social networks: Behance, Blogger, Delicious, DeviantArt, Dribbble, Facebook, Flickr, GitHub, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, RSS, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Vimeo, WordPress, Yahoo! & YouTube.

As long as you don’t mind taking your time to change the design and the setttings of the plugin and if you are looking for a feature-heavy plugin then WP Author Bio is for you.

The next author bio box plugin that was recommended to me so I don’t wanna go over it – although I was a little disappointed about it:

Guerrilla’s Author Box — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/guerrillas-author-box/Guerrilla’s Author Box — WordPress Plugins This is a plugin that adds an author box to the end of your posts, showing off the authors name, description, website link and gravatar powered avatar.

Guerillas Author Box does little more than pulling your image from gravatar and display the links to your social profiles – that’s it.

One last free plugin that looked nice and shiny on wordpress.org is “simple author box”. Unfortunately it did not work at all in my blog.

Simple Author Box — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-author-box/Simple Author Box — WordPress Plugins Simple Author Box adds a responsive author box at the end of your posts, showing the author name, author gravatar and author description. It also adds over 30 social profile fields on WordPress user profile screen, allowing to display the author social icons.

 

 

 

Just in case you are running a blog with multiple authors or a larger magazine-like site, you might use “co-authors plus” from wordpress.org. It allows you to add multiple authors to one post – in case you want to give credits to several writers/bloggers/authors for one post:

Co-Authors Plus — WordPress Plugins

https://wordpress.org/plugins/co-authors-plus/Co-Authors Plus — WordPress Plugins Assign multiple bylines to posts, pages, and custom post types via a search-as-you-type input box. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s archive page and in their feed. Co-authors may edit the posts they are associated with, and co-authors who are contributors may only edit posts if they have not been published (as is core behavior). Add writers as bylines without creating WordPress user accounts. Simply create a guest author profile for the writer and assign the byline as you normally would.

 

Premium / Paid author bio plugins

WP – Author Box by phpbits | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/wp-author-box/6815678WP – Author Box by phpbits | CodeCanyon A very useful WordPress profile plugin that can be easily customised to match your current and favourite themes. Increase user engagement by adding unlimited custom tabs with custom content, recent post types entries and even contact form supports. Your ultimate WordPress Author Box plugin that also comes with custom widgets that you can user perfectly on any of your sidebars and footer widgets.

 

One of the best selling author bio plugins on CodeCanyon is “fanciest Author Box” from ThematoSoup. It’s sold for 18 US-$.

Fanciest Author Box by ThematoSoup | CodeCanyon

https://codecanyon.net/item/fanciest-author-box/2504522Fanciest Author Box by ThematoSoup | CodeCanyon This premium author bio plugin is very easy to use and customize. Right after installation the author bio is, by default, enabled on all your posts, pages and custom post types. You can disable the author box where you don’t want it or implement it manually using. Fanciest Author Box allows readers to learn about authors and connect with them on all major social networks.
It has an outstanding rating of 4,45 (of 5 ) stars on Codecanyon.

 

The fancy Author Box Plugin allows you to tweek literally every aspect of your bio box. Just in case you are not satisfied with the free plugins above – just give it a try.

Conclusion:

There are a lot of free plugins on wordpress.org that allow you to change the look and feel of your auhtors bio box. If you want to go with a premium bio plugin you might go with “fanciest author box” which is sold more than 3.500 times on Codecanyon or the premium version of WP Author Box which also sells at Envato.

After I changed the wordpress theme of my personal blog at wordpress-expert.info to the genesis framework I had to look for a author box plugin myself. After Itesting  more that 10 of them I choose to go with WP Author Box Lite (the free version) as it gave me the ease of use and simplicity while providing the maximum features (gravatar image, social media icons and related post).

Which author bio box plugin do you use in your blog? Leave a comment below and let use know.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: author, author bio, plugins

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