In the last video we reviewed the history of WordPress and how it has become the world’s most dominant Content Management System—by far. One of the primary reasons for its dominance is its origin as an open source platform. As a result, anyone can build a plugin for WordPress, and if they build a good one they’ll have a massive marketplace of potential customers.
And the more plugin developers succeed the more they improve the overall value of the WordPress ecosystem. It’s an upward spiral of growth and innovation.
This week I want to review a few plugins that significantly extend the capabilities of WordPress. But I’ve narrowed this very short list (compared to the full marketplace of nearly 100,000 plugins) to those that add the most functionality and also integrate with Elementor, since Elementor is a major part of the Low-Code/No-Code revolution.
I mentioned WooCommerce last week, and I think I said that WordPress released it in 2011, which was incorrect. WooCommerce was originally built by WooThemes in 2011, and was later acquired by Automattic (the company behind WordPress).
WooCommerce is a powerful eCommerce platform used by brands such as New Balance, Harley-Davidson, and Nestlé. Because it’s so popular, it has a host of third party plugins that extend its already robust native eCommerce capabilities. And so not only does Elementor offer plenty of WooCommerce integrations, but there are a host of third party developers that offer even more Elementor/WooCommerce integration tools. Here’s a list of a few…
You can start to see just how expansive the WordPress ecosystem is when you have multiple companies releasing products, not just for WordPress, but as addons for a combination of two other WordPress plugins.
Another popular WordPress plugin is Gravity Forms. Gravity forms can be used for simple contact forms, or for very complex, multi-page forms with conditional logic, save progress, and more. Gravity Forms offers Elementor integrations, and many of the Elementor add-on providers I just listed also offer Gravity form features of their own. Gravity forms, like Elementor itself, has a long list of third party addons that can turn Gravity forms into quizzes, or integrate it into CRM systems, or email marketing platforms, along with many other features and integrations.
Another plugin called MemberPress enables websites to offer member only or subscriber only content. It manages member accounts, processes transactions for membership payments, and handles a host of notifications with users for everything from resetting passwords, to reminding them of upcoming subscription renewals. Of course, MemberPress integrates with Elementor. And yes, you guessed it, there are a host of other plugin providers that extend MemberPress just like there are for Elementor, WooCommerce, and Gravity Forms. I hope the pattern is becoming clear.
These plugins and addons are so robust they almost always have a solution for just about any need. If you ever did encounter a case where one of these platforms didn’t have a feature you needed, you could pretty easily have a custom plugin made. That’s where the “low code’ aspect of Low-Code/No-Code development comes in. But you’re always way better off resting on a robust product, supported by another company, and then adding a thin slide of your own code, than trying to replicate and maintain your own code to fulfill these technical requirements.
And one more side note: When you work with the most popular plugins like WooCommerce and Gravity Forms you’ll almost always find that these plugins integrate with each other, and that even smaller less popular plugins will frequently integrate with these major plugins since it extends the value of their features.
The way the WordPress ecosystem works, the more popular your plugin becomes the more others integrate with it, making it even more valuable.
One of my favorite recent plugin discoveries is FluentCRM. Fluent turns your WordPress website into a customer relationship management system and provides its own email marketing automation tools. Not only does this eliminate the need for one or two additional third party platforms for CRM and Marketing—it also, in terms of email deliverability, way out performs those third party email platforms.
The first time I sent a campaign using Fluent my email inbox got flooded with out of the office autoresponder messages. While that was a pain, it reflected the fact that my emails were getting through! Previously, using a different platform, I received just a handful of such notifications, but with Fluent it was at least 10 times that quantity—meaning 10 times the inbox delivery! And of course it offers an Elementor integration.
TranslatePress is another tool we use quite a bit. It allows you to toggle a site’s language using either its autotranslate service, or you can add your own manual transitions—or a little bit of both. It uses a string matching system, so if you translate the word “contact” into another language, it will automatically translate that word wherever it finds it. That’s powerful, but sometimes it creates unintended problems. For example, sometimes a word like “contact” means “reach out to us” in English, but it can also mean “point of meeting,” like making contact between wires in an outlet. English homonyms don’t carry through into other languages that use entirely different words for these alternate meanings.
Unfortunately, with string matching, you can’t change your translation based on that kind of content. But because TranslatePress has an Elementor integration, you can compensate for these fairly rare occurrences by placing manual text elements in those places and setting them to only appear for the alternate language versions of the site. The combination of TranslatePress and Elementor makes this a great tool for multilingual websites.
Another plugin framework we use quite a bit is Modern Events Calendar. Calendar systems are quite complex with all sorts of rules for repeating events, exceptions, ticketed versus free events, and much more. MEC has all the features you’d need for a calendar system, and it has a very robust integration with Elementor. It provides add-ons for booking and ticketing—with waiting lists, Zoom integration—and, like I mentioned a moment ago, it integrates with some of the other popular plugin frameworks like WooCommerce, and with the next plugin on our list—BuddyBoss.
BuddyBoss is a community building plugin built off of an open source discussion board plugin called BBPress. BuddyBoss allows you to essentially turn your WordPress site into a mini-Facebook experience. Participants can follow each other, comment on each other’s posts, direct message, take classes, and more. And of course it has a robust integration with Elementor, as well as with WooCommerce, MemberPress, and with the next plugin on deck, LearnDash.
LearnDash is a Learning Management System or LMS. An LMS allows your site visitors to sign up for classes, work through curriculum, and take quizzes and tests. And using some of the third party LearnDash add-ons you can allow students to work in groups, keep notes, track grades and scores, and work toward certifications. And again, at the risk of getting very repetitive, it integrates with Elementor, WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, MemberPress, and BuddyBoss.
This kind of broad based mutual support between these learning plugin frameworks is one of the reasons why the Low-Code/No-Code revolution is so powerful and only getting more and more enriched as time goes on.
There are so many more plugins we could add to this list, but we’ll wrap up with GiveWP.
GiveWP is a donation platform. So if your client is a non-profit organization that solicits donations, GiveWP can allow you to process donations of various amounts and levels. And with add-on you can set up recurring donations, enable peer-to-peer fundraising, and even add text-to-give capabilities. Behind the scenes GiveWP provides a donor database to help manage these accounts and do more direct fundraising with your donor base. GiveWP also has integrations with Salesforce and other email marketing platforms.
This has been a somewhat longer video than I usually post, but even so, we’ve just scratched the surface of the many powerful plugin frameworks that inter operate with each other and have a stable of additional plugin developers that extend their capabilities.
The WordPress Low-Code/No-Code eco-system is massive, robust, thriving and growing. Why would you ever need to recreate the wheel and bear the cost of building custom solutions like these that cannot possibly keep up with the innovation and growth of specialized platforms?
The Low-Code/No-Code is here, and it’s transforming the way websites are built.
Until next time,
Viva la Revolución!
