March Update – An End to the Madness

Hi there! Well, March is almost over, so I guess you can call this post a buzzer beater. We’re going to talk about the timeline over the next few weeks and where the Beaver Themer and Beaver Builder 2.0 launches fit in. We have some updates completed and some updates coming down the pipe for our website here. We have an event or two coming up, some plugs, and some love to dole out. Oh, and be sure to mark off April 20th at 1pm pst on your calendar—we’re having a birthday party! Let’s gooooo…

Beaver Themer & Beaver Builder 2.0 Status

After catching the ProBeaver newsletter this week and seeing Chris Lema’s post in our Facebook group, we realize that everyone’s pretty excited about the Beaver Themer launch. Thanks, guys! It’s really nice to see the positive feedback, and we’re really excited too.

Here is a status update and game plan: the alpha launch is going really well. There haven’t been any critical bugs or major conflicts and we’re pretty happy with the “production readiness” of the codebase.

We’re in the process of deciding some of the business aspects of the new product: pricing, licensing, renewals, integrating and selling a new product on our store. That’s all humming along, but it’s taking some time to get right.

We aimed to launch in May and we’re still very much on schedule. Woot! Once BT is out in the wild, the next project will be to release Beaver Builder 2.0. I think we can expect a beta version of 2.0 sometime in the next few weeks and a launch not long after the BT launch. We appreciate your patience. For all our sakes, we’re working hard to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s before we go live.

We Need Your Rating 🙏🏼

Have you seen the new WordPress Plugin Repo design? It’s pretty slick. Our buddy Vova wrote up a really interesting article about the changes to the search engine and how plugins can improve their ranking. TL;DR: ratings matter more now than they did before.

Look, I really hate asking people for things. I try to do everything myself. But, in this case, we really need your help. We’d love to get a few more reviews for Beaver Builder. Even if you hate Beaver Builder, we still want to hear your feedback! 🙂

If you have a sec, pretty please leave us a review on WordPress.org. It’s one of the easiest ways you can help bring more people into our awesome community.

Domain Manager and Store Update

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been working with our friend Josh, from Reaktiv Studios, on our website. They helped us fine tune a really spiffy staging and deployment process and we’ve already pushed a few changes to our store.

One of those changes is an update to the Domain Manager on your account page. We added the ability to bulk activate or deactivate domains, pagination now persists after the page reloads, and we fixed a pesky bug that caused old domains to reappear.

Auto Renew for New Customers

This one is pretty exciting, we’re planning to implement automatic renewals on our store for new customers and products. So, the plan is to have an auto renewal option for Beaver Themer. For now, any existing subscriptions (i.e., yours if you’re reading this in March 2017) will continue to need a manual renewal.

We debated a lot on whether we wanted to make this change. In the end, we think it’s going to be a convenience feature and worth the trouble of implementing. I know there are folks out there who don’t like auto renew—don’t worry! We’re going to make it extremely easy to cancel. When WooCommerce 3.0 releases later this spring, we’re going to explore the possibility of having auto-renewal for all existing subscriptions. That way, you can just set it and forget it.

Beaver Builder 1.9.5 is Live

We released a minor update with a couple bug fixes and features. Two of the biggies are that we updated Google fonts and added support for some italic versions that weren’t loading. Also, we added a setting field for a custom email subject in the contact form and subscribe module.

Take a peek at the Beaver Builder changelogs to see all the changes and bug fixes!

A Shout Out to Gerard and Our Translators

This month, we wanted to sing some praises for our translation team. By team, I mean a super-cool group of bi-lingual volunteers that have generously—like, really generously—donated their time to translate Beaver Builder.

Gerard, aka nomad411 on Slack, manages all of these translations and our GlotPress setup. There are over 35 different languages available. Crazy! Gerard’s also the main man and mastermind behind the Beaver Builders Slack Channel. If you or a client have used a translated version of Beaver Builder, we’d love to hear about your experience in the comments! Thanks, Gerard and thanks to everyone that’s helped with this effort.

P.S. If you’re interested in helping, we offer a license or renewal to all the folks that help create and maintain translations.

Beaver Builder Development Animation

Our buddy Simon Prosser put together a really cool animation that was rendered from Beaver Builder’s git repo history. This is a visual representation of all the code changes and branches from the Beaver Builder repo. Pretty cool! I’m going to have to buy Justin and the dev team a beer because they’ve obviously been working really hard.

Footnotes

Reddit Update

The Beaver Builder Subreddit is really picking up speed. Thanks to /u/stuckinspace for putting some work into making it look pretty and writing up some posting guidelines. If you haven’t been there in a bit, check out the new coat of paint.

Want Some Beaver Stickers?

We use StickerMule for our stickers because they’re competitively priced, high quality, and we try to support fellow companies with animal names. We added our infamous beaver sticker to the StickerMule marketplace so, if you’ve been dying to get your hands on one, now’s your chance!

PressNomics 2017

This is a bit last minute, but we’re going to be in Phoenix, AZ for PressNomics next week. Will you be there? Let’s link up!

Beaver Builder’s 3rd Birthday

Next month, we’re going to be celebrating Beaver Builder’s 3rd Birthday. Holy cow! I think we should throw a party. We hosted a Slack Halloween party a few years back and it was really fun. Mark your calendars, on April 20th at 1 pm pst we’ll wrangle up as much of the team as we can and hang out for an hour in the Beaver Builder Slack! It’s not the worst day for a celebration, right? Hope to see you all there.

In Closing

The months keep flying by faster and faster. I really can’t believe we’re coming up on our 3rd birthday. It’s surreal. Thanks so much to all of your for your support. This train would have derailed a long time ago if it wasn’t for you. Until next time.

Now go leave us a review, please! 😂