Sarah Gooding
Despite the flurry of April Fools day jokes circulating today, the WordPress product market has been heating up in the past couple weeks with new entrants that we are highlighting in a roundup. These products range from newly in beta to fully launched. Some are banking on the freemium model and others are fully commercial products.
APPExperts is a new mobile application builder plugin that is now in beta, developed by the WPExperts team. It turns WordPress and WooCommerce websites into fully functional apps for iOS and Android phones, tablets, and other mobile devices. The plugin on WordPress.org functions as a connector to the APPExperts platform, which is powered by Flutter.
Users can create their first app for free and the commercial version includes additional features like push notifications, ads integration, and plugin integrations. APPExperts is going up against more established competitors like AppPresser, which bills annually for the use of its platform. During its pre-beta period, APPExperts added 500 users on its connector plugin who generated more than 1,000 apps for iOS and Android.
WP Wallet is a new product, created by the team behind MasterWP, that helps WordPress site owners keep track of their license keys for commercial themes and plugins. The idea is to prevent users from missing license renewals, losing license keys, and struggling with invoicing. The service scans each website added to the account and retrieves any commercial license subscription fees, capturing any administrative details. It can also send invoices for payment via PayPal or Stripe with no transaction fees. Everything related to commercial licenses is organized into a single dashboard.
WP Wallet is free forever for up to three websites and is supported by ads. Free users can share access with unlimited team members and connect to Stripe or PayPal. Upgrading to Pro is less than $10 per month and allows users to add unlimited sites, connect multiple payment gateways, and will soon include a Chrome Extension and API.
Block Styles is a new plugin now in beta that lets users further customize core blocks with unique styles. It works with many popular block collection plugins and boasts “fully responsive block-level design control.” This allows users to change style attributes based on desktop, tablet, and mobile sizes, and eventually customer device sizes, hover/action states and pseudo elements.
The Block Styles plugin has advanced layout controls with visibility settings that can be set based on user role, device size, and login status. It also adds the ability to customize the background of every Gutenberg block with colors, gradient options, and linear and radial settings. The team is working on adding multiple backgrounds and video backgrounds. The plugin has support for advanced border styles, typography controls, special effects, animations, and custom CSS for every block.
Pricing for the Block Styles plugin ranges from $69/year for one site to $499/year for unlimited sites.
Stock Control for WooCommerce is a new plugin that launched this week, created by plugin developer Edith Allison. It makes it easier to manage WooCommerce inventory and make quick adjustments. Store owners can manipulate stock, and change descriptions, images, attributes, and categories all on one page.
Product changes can be published immediately or saved for review later. The plugin also logs who made the changes and when. It uses the Heartbeat API to monitor the shop and will notify if there is an editing conflict with another site manager. It will also notify if stock quantities change while the site owner is working on the products.
Stock Control for WooCommerce starts at €29,90/year for single site licenses and goes up to €149,90/year for agencies. The roadmap for future updates includes more translations, an attribute manager, bulk actions, scheduled publication of changes, compatibility with Woo Product Bundles, and a way to show “held” stock.
Great write up Sarah 🎉🥳🎉🥳
Much better than that long-winded what’s-his-name that works with you 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣
Thank you for the fantastic write-up! Seeing my plugin reviewed in its first week on WPTavern is amazing and a great motivation to get started on improvements for the next release. 😀
This is the best example of the total failure of the Gutenberg force-in that I have seen in a bit.
The fact that you need to spend $70 or more per year for basic styling of blocks that Automattic has spent gob knows how much money and time developing, and beggin’ the world to donate time to make better, for how long now?
And still you can’t do many basic things without an extra plugin, and often times a paid upgrade to some random third party that no one knows if we can trust a year from now.
I weep for wordpress seeing this today.
Thank you Sarah for covering the exclusive news related to APPExperts plugin beta launch in this article along with other WordPress products. I always admire your story building capability and a huge fan of WPTavern blog. 🍻
I totally agree with DJSteve. It’s absolutely incomprehensible that Gutenberg hasn’t had responsive features since its inception. Certainly there was so much to do, but it should have been a priority. The most worrying is the lack of clear visibility when responsive will arrive officially in Gutenberg.
And by the way $70 to have the responsive is overpriced. For example, Clicwy, which offers much, much more in terms of features for Gutenberg, is $49/year for three licenses.
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