pl-platform

been using this for a while. Don’t use this, and don’t pay for the pro version. Lots of small issues makes this a bad choice, and it’s no longer properly maintained.

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.

No more support from staffs. I asked Pagelines to cancel their unauthorized transaction 25 days ago by multiple emails. But they even sent me a reply. Never use this ugly plugin.

As someone who’s used PageLines for over 5 years now; I can honestly say that I cannot recommend their framework. Their support is non-existent… they have one or two people who answer forum posts… but they delete any post questioning their future.

Please note that this is meant to be a constructive review of the plugin based on my own testing. Some of what I mention may seem harsh to the developer, but it is meant to spur them on to create something better. Hope it is viewed as such. I have tested PageLines and found it a very good system overall. There are many thoughtful components to it and only a few that I personally would change. Note: I am mentioning other page builders in this comment, not to advertise them but to provide a clear comparison to back up my comments. I found text editing awkward to use in some ways in PageLines compared to other front end page editors – and the absence of on-page drag and drop functionality was mostly frustrating. Editing the text modules off the page in a special modal field slows things down, even though it often shows the results live on the page (I say often because sometimes my changes didn’t show up on the page until after I saved and turned off the builder). This is a text editing disconnect that is slower than other systems out there and, frankly, unnecessary given that there are several front end page builders that let you edit text right on the page, including one completely free one called Live Composer (also available in the Wordpress Plugin Directory), Page Builder Sandwich (not free), Thrive (not free), and others. Re: drag and drop – The reason I found this mostly less effective in PageLines is that having to move around the various modules using only the old backend page building style kind of makes no sense, even if it is in a window right next to the on-page layout. I desperately wanted to drag and drop rows and modules on the page, such as can be done by other front end page editors like Live Composer, Beaver Builder, Motopress, Page Builder Sandwich and the like. Combining the current method in PageLines with on-page drag and drop positioning would be tremendous, however. The PageLines method is particularly good a locating and targeting elements on a busy page overall. I liked that! Worth a three to four star rating for being reasonably simple to use right out of the box, and for the included full layouts and features that can be just dropped into the layout. Get that drag and drop thing figured out and the text editing right (imo) and it would be pretty cool to work in. My suggestion for all developers of page building plugins is to fully examine the competition to see what is already out there, and create something better. What is the point of creating something worse or more complicated compared to something else that already exists?

I am blown away by the clunky nature of this visual editor. This has got to be the single most terrible plugin to happen to web site development. My head already hurts knowing that I have no other choice for this emergency project I have just been brought in on. #booooooooooooooooo