Tremendous Time Saving Framework

This plugin is really the gateway to a broader framework you can use with the Pagelines themes and extensions in order to develop a WordPress site really fast.

It won’t design the site for you like some fixed theme templates, so you still have to be creative. But it gives you a blank slate that you can very quickly fill with header/footer and body content. This also isn’t a WYSIWYG visual editor like Wix (if you’re on WordPress you should abhor Wix anyway!) or even quite like the WP visual editor, but better in my opinion.

The two best things about it, and why we frequently come back to using it for WordPress builds, is that everything we add on the front end previews and saves via AJAX (i.e. you don’t have to hard refresh it to see your changes live, like a lot of visual editors out there) which is very useful in low bandwidth international/traveling scenarios (still a lot of digital nomads on WordPress these days I hope?) and the fact that the CSS/LESS editor is live preview as you enter the CSS into it. We’ve had new staff come into our agency who worked in web design for years and somehow never knew how much help a live CSS previewer on WordPress could be. If you know some basic CSS this feature can help you do almost anything your design needs on the WordPress theme you are building off of Pagelines. The page template feature is very handy too, once you make a good page design in one spot, you can save all the elements to quickly load in another similar page, then just swap out graphic elements/text as needed.

Our agency has been using Pageline frameworks since their pre-DMS days back in 2012 and have always been satisfied with the tools they offer. I’m not writing this because of any relationship our agency has with Pagelines (we don’t, they probably have no clue who we even are and we’ve never published a plugin for their framework even) but because I hate to see a good product and useful tool maligned in the WP community by reviewers who probably don’t know how to even use the tool properly. It’s like seeing a 16 year old kid who just learned to drive a car climb on the back of a Ducati and ask where the brake pedals are…

I can’t speak to their staffing size or future (like some reviewers seem to be doing!) but I know in the past we would suggest bug fixes (you have to include your code too guys, if you are developers you know you can’t just complain about it, show them the line and issue) and we’d see our updated code pushed live in their next framework version. Made us feel like they were listening, which I’m pretty sure they were! What makes the open source WordPress community great is that those in it help make each others work better, and not just sit waiting for hand outs and code freebies. If you have an issue with the PL5 tool set why not join their dev community and help make it better.