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UPDATE: Poll is now closed. Thank you to the many in the Themeco community who took part in helping the shape the future of X and Cornerstone!
Hey everybody!
We had so much fun with our last poll that we thought we’d open up another one and get some more feedback from our fantastic community on another subject that we’re exploring some more. 🙂 We’re going to keep this running for two weeks, until October 19, 2015.
As you all know from working with WordPress, one of the awesome things about the platform itself is the fact that it’s so easily extendable. If you want to do something in your theme, chances are somebody else out there has already made a plugin for it. We have made it an important mission of ours to ensure X integrates as seamlessly as possible with all of the major third party plugins out on the market (bbPress, BuddyPress, WooCommerce, Gravity Forms, Contact Form 7, Revolution Slider, et cetera), along with building out our own custom functionality. We’re going to ask you a few questions below, but first I want to explain the difference between “custom functionality” and integration with a third party plugin
- Custom Functionality – these are elements or features that we develop to work seamlessly with X and target a very specific task. Our Video Lock plugin is a great example of this as it is built for a very targeted area: video marketing. We took some concepts we have learned from our marketing experts and turned this into a small, yet immensely useful tool that carries out this one task very well.
- Integration – an integration with a third party plugin takes on all kinds of forms within X. Sometimes we provide custom styling or functionality for popular plugins to make them work within X more seamlessly (think WooCommerce or bbPress), or sometimes we simply partner with providers to bring you tools to use within the theme (such as Revolution Slider or Soliloquy).
Now that we have that out of the way, we’d love to ask you a few questions below. Some of these will be slightly “open ended” and ask for more feedback below in the comments. Please note that if asked to provide a plugin or type of plugin you’d like to see integrated, keep this response limited to your top ideas (a post listing 50 plugins to be integrated is not helpful for us). Letting us know your top two or three gives us a better overall picture of the landscape of how people are using X and want to continue using it in the future. Thanks!
Do you lean more towards custom functionality (e.g. our Video Lock plugin) or integration with additional third party providers (whether that is custom styling or simply bundling the tool in with the theme)? No matter how you vote, please provide at least one example (no more than three) of the types you would like to see in the comments below.
[poll question=’Your voice on: custom functionality or integrations’ answers=’I prefer the idea of custom functionality developed by Themeco,I prefer additional integrations with third party plugins’]
Regarding third party plugin integrations, do you lean more towards providing additional styling and functionality for specific tools to make them function more seamlessly within the theme (such as WooCommerce or bbPress mentioned above), or do you simply like having additional tools at your disposal to use if you choose (like Soliloquy). Please provide at least one and no more than three examples of the types of plugins you would like to see integrated on a more involved level or simply to have bundled in the theme in the comments below.
[poll question=’Your voice on: integration preference’ answers=’I prefer fewer more involved integrations with “big players” in the plugin market,I prefer the idea of having more tools at my disposal even if it means their integration is not as deep’]
Thanks for the great job you are doing!
Keep it on!!!and hope our feedback will lead to a stronger product at end!
ditto 🙂
You already listed the plugins I would have mentioned for both questions in the second paragraph 🙂
Additional to consider: Some of the more popular WooCommerce plugins, i.e. Subscriptions, Membership, Bookings. You already cover WooCommerce core, and those three don’t require too much extra in terms of dev hours – mostly declaring them.
My take:
Spend less time working on proprietary things unless it includes easy assimilation of other tools and plugins.
For example, while Cornerstone will benefit your company in the long run, in the short run it’s been slow going to get to something as enjoyable and stable as visual composer. Don’t do that again.
If there’s a leader in a category, work with them, don’t reinvent the wheel.
Another example, Cornerstone has a slider but it’s garbage compared to Revolution Slider.
I’m being honest, but I’m a fan of your theme and think your team does good work.
Plugins I use regularly:
BackupBuddy
Enable Media Replace (indispensable tool)Surely some and some here!
For example I always install Kraken Image Optimiser, Gravity Forms and Yoast SEO while setting up wordpress and X.
A good image gallery that would answer that “I want to add my own photos to my galleries in the future” email from customers would be good!
But this is surely quite an easy thing, look at the most popular and useful stuff on Codecanyon and the plugin directory and go from there!
The Events Calendar by Tri.be and integrated flickr and instagram galleries for both pages and sidebars.
I would really like to see a decent lightbox plugin integrated into cornerstone, one feature that I am definitely missing from this great page composer.
I’m looking into creating a couple marketplaces that would be based on wcvendors.com’s vendor plugin. Having their vendor dashboard options integrated into the buddy press user account dashboard and theme styling integrated for at least the free version of this useful tool set would be a tremendous value add to X.
Yes, WC Vendors would be a really handy one!
Event Espresso?Love your customer interaction and service guys – this is what it’s all about!
1) I voted that I prefer the idea if custom functionality purely because I am very busy and maintaining websites is not my core work area – to go in and click update and not have to worry about third party integration issues is fine by me!
SEO – CACHING – SECURITY
2) For the same reasons as above and for the same areas I voted for more involved integration.
FWIW I tend to use W3 Supercache / Yoast / Woo / AIO
But whichever way you go – keep on keeping on – you are doing great work and X is so pleasant to work with! (I’m even getting clients into using cornerstone now on some occasions – they love it!)
As per Mark M’s comment; we need a lightbox!
Used regularly are NINJA FORMS, YOAST SEO, WORDFENCE
I am using X with the Sensei Plugin by WooCommerce and I would love to see better integration with X. I had to do a lot of jerry rigging with it. I’m using it on http://www.lvbbi.com .
Hey Guys
Thanks for reaching out to us again for feedback, it’s great to be so involved in the direction of X!
I would absolutely LOVE it if you developed functionality to trigger lightboxes from buttons or text, which can display forms (Gravity Forms, CF7 or otherwise) as this would be fantastic from a lead generation perspective. The ability to create 2-step opt-in processes natively with X would be a game-changer.
With regards to plugin integrations, I like what can be done with ThemePunch’s Essential Grid (although to be fair it seems to work pretty well out of the box anyway). Perhaps this is something that could be bundled or even just the functionality developed as a native part of X.
I would also like to see deeper integration with Gravity Forms. Might just be me, but I have had issues getting styling to work and have fallen back to CF7.
Hope this helps!
PS. I know that these things are just in the discussion stage, but I’m itching to know how those discussions are developing, so any time you feel like updating us on what may or may get off the ground / likely timescales etc, it would be very welcome!
Matt
The topic ‘Plugin Integrations: Vote on It!’ is closed to new replies.
