“The Grid(io)” VS WordPress

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There’s a new kid on the web-design block calling itself “The Grid(io)” – and it has a lot of hype. It promises to build your website for you using “Artificial Intelligence” and “Robots” – and that it will save you hours of time by not needing to worry about the nitty-gritty parts of your website. If you’d like to see the advertisement in question, it’s here.

Basically, their advertising makes it seem like you just put all of your content on a USB stick, throw it at a computer, and out will come a beautiful website – which will be everything you ever dreamed of and more! Literally, the sell line is: “Wouldn’t it be better if websites just made themselves?”.

Is this possible? Maybe. But it brings to mind something Dad used to tell me:

“Son, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is” – My Dad

Lets take a step back for a moment and look at this for what it really is – an advertisement. It’s an advertisement that simultaneously attacks services like Squarespace and WordPress (for being template-based) while presenting itself as a sort of “Second Coming” of web design.

Its cleverly worded verbiage almost convinced me that things I formally thought were downfalls of a WordPress theme – are actually somehow bonuses with “The Grid”:

These are “The Grid”‘s main selling points:

  • You can’t put things where you want them. Robots do it.
  • You can’t choose your own font. Robots do it.
  • You can’t choose the size/placement of your images. Robots do it.
  • And so on. You can’t choose display option “X”. Robots will choose that for you now.

Now, call me crazy, but those aren’t the selling points (or the robots/droids) I’m looking for.

not-the-selling-points

Is “The Grid” all that different from WordPress?

Even with WordPress (Or even Squarespace, Wix, or “The Grid“), another thing to consider is that most of the time spent working on your website isn’t coding or messing with layouts. No matter your website’s foundation, most of the time is spent creating content.

Most “website time” is spent doing things like:

  • Getting great Photography (by taking it or finding/buying Stock Photos)
  • Creating an awesome Promo Video
  • Writing great blogs and text content
  • Posting your latest product to your store
  • Keeping your website’s event calendar up to date

Don’t let the advertisement fool you: this stuff takes time. I can guarantee “The Grid” will not do that stuff for you – nor will it be faster than WordPress or any other system. But according to the ad, it feels like that stuff will do itself too. If it was truly as easy as they make it sound, it would. After all, “Website’s should make themselves” right? Wrong. People make content – and websites ARE content. All of the “robots” in the world won’t make you good and unique content. It’s what separates humans from robots (at least for now).

Truth be told, “The Grid” doesn’t seem all that different from a pre-designed WordPress Theme (other than the fact that you have more control over your WordPress theme – especially if it uses MP Stacks – or, heck, even some of the other great Page Building Plugins for WordPress out there).

If there’s one main thing I’ve learned about people building websites in my over 10 years of doing web design, making themes, and developing plugins, it’s that people WANT control over their website. They want to be able to move their things around as they see fit – not a robot making those choices for them. At the beginning of WordPress Themes, themes were intended to be what The Grid is: something you never have to “mess with”, that looks great, and can accept your content: and they generally still are exactly that. But even with Themes, people want more control. They want to be able to do stuff like use a font of their own choosing. With “The Grid”, Robots do that for you now.

Basically, it seems like you’ll be paying a lot of money to have LESS control over your site and get a design/layout that you may or may not love – and have no control over making it your own – other than asking “the robots” for something new and hoping they spit out perfection.

I’m not trying to bash a new idea. This really could be the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe it isn’t too good to be true. But it never hurts to take a step back and realize you are watching an advertisement tooting its own horn. I still strongly believe that WordPress is the best website solution out there. It has years of testing behind it, a HUGE, talented, passionate, and committed community, and is constantly being upgraded – literally daily. It isn’t a flash in the pan and it won’t be gone tomorrow with your cash in its pocket.

My desire with this blog post is just to shine a realistic light on some extremely cleverly worded (and a bit  over-the-top) advertising before everybody throws their websites off a cliff without looking first.

Knapstack Theme updates are now totally free!

We are kicking the new year off right – by giving away our Knapstack Theme! The new update (version 1.0.7.0) changes the Knapstack theme to now include free updates. Initially we were charging $5/year for updates to the theme but realized most people were just leaving their theme un-updated – which isn’t good for anybody. So to help keep the wheels greased and the machine ticking along the way it should, we are giving away both the Knapstack Theme – and all future Knapstack Theme updates for free.

Knapstack Theme

 

Another major upgrade is the sidebars. There are now 3 different sidebar areas in the Knapstack Theme:

  • The Category Sidebar (displays to the right of any category archive)
  • The Post Sidebar (displays to the right of any post)
  • The Page Sidebar (display to the right of any page using the 600px wide page template)
The new sidebars in the Knapstack Theme can be found on the "Appearance" > "Widgets" page in your WP dashboard.

The new sidebars in the Knapstack Theme can be found on the “Appearance” > “Widgets” page in your WP dashboard.

One of the coolest things about sidebars is that the newest version of MP Stacks (our free Page Building Plugin for WordPress) allows you to use a Stack in a sidebar using the “Stack” widget under “Appearance” > “Widgets”.

This means that all the power and flexibility of MP Stacks can be used on JUST the sidebar! This expands the power of sidebars hugely – allowing you to have your own backgrounds, content-types, grids, and even Add-ons like Parallax.

So to sum it all up, you never need to worry about paying for updates to the Knapstack Theme ever again! They are on the house – courtesy of us here at Mint Plugins.

MP Stacks Updated to 1.0.1.3

We just released a big update for the MP Stacks Page-Building plugin. One of the best new features in Version 1.0.1.3 is the auto sizing of large text for small screens. Prior to this release, if you made a Text Content-Type in a Brick with a large font size, the words would get cut off on mobile screens.

Now, MP Stacks will automatically figure out the maximum size the text can be based on the longest word in your text area so that it fits perfectly on the Mobile screen without being cut-off or split up in any way.

This is all part of our philosophy to make it easy and fun for you to make fonts in a brick exactly how you’d like them on large screens, without needing to be bothered with options for smaller screens – but handling it perfectly all by itself. It’s small things like that that are often overlooked in mobile layouts – and is now one that MP Stacks handles perfectly. The update is available completely for free. Enjoy!

Are you a Developer & new to Git? This is an awesome read!

Are you a developer who is just getting started with using Git? Perhaps you’re feeling kind of lost and don’t know where to start. It can feel like trying to fly an airplane in the dark with forks in your eyes. If that’s you, don’t give up! Keep going – and here’s a really awesome and free e-book from the makers of Tower – which is also a great way to manage Git Projects if you use a mac and don’t feel super comfortable with using the Command Line.

Check it out! http://www.git-tower.com/learn/ebook/mac

A way to save money at Trade Shows

I was recently doing some work for a client who wanted to show their website at a Trade Show – but the Trade Show was only providing internet for $1500 per booth for 2 days!!! To us it was too crazy to pay that much – and so instead, we built a local version of their websites on their laptop so they could properly show the site off – without needing internet. We did this without even needing to change the domain name – by simply temporarily telling their computer to point to a local directory on their hardrives when visiting that URL.

A bulk of this I got from this post here:
http://sawmac.com/mamp/virtual/

The general idea was to set up a MAMP on their laptops, create a virtual host file for the site, and then modify their hosts file to point the domain at their local IP (127.0.0.1) instead of at their website.

Just something to consider if you’re in the same boat! All of the info you need is in that post above to set this up 🙂

Image Used: “IBM CeBIT 2010” by Patrick from Garbsen, Germany – IBM. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_CeBIT_2010.jpg#mediaviewer/File:IBM_CeBIT_2010.jpg

 

 

Important update to the Knapstack Theme

Hey everybody! WordPress 4.0 just dropped and it’s time to update your installs. This also means that many of your plugins and/or themes may also need updates. As grueling as that can be sometimes (and scary), it’s an important thing to not let yourself fall behind in updates because security risks are always addressed with new updates – and better ways of doing things too!

Rest assured, if you have any questions at all, I’ll be glad to answer them as quickly as I can – just send an email to support@mintplugins.com and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Our Knapstack Theme needs to be updated to keep up with changes to the Easy Digital Downloads plugin. Some of the styling on your download archive pages (categories, tags, etc), may not line up correctly if you update EDD. The new Knapstack Release fixes those issue – so grab it from your dashboard under “Dashboard” > “Updates” (if you’ve paid for auto updates), or manually update the theme by downloading the latest zip from here:

https://mintplugins.com/plugins/knapstack-theme/

WordPress 3.9

If you’re rocking the MP Stacks plugin, make sure you upgrade both MP Core and MP Stacks when you upgrade to WordPress 3.9. It’s fully working and has has also had a few great upgrades to improve speed and performance.

Here’s the full list of upgrades and fixes in the latest version:

 

== Changelog ==

= 1.0.0.9 = April 16, 2014
* Updated TinyMCE Plugin for TinyMCE 4.0
* CSS is now output in the header instead of the footer
* Added “Stack Only” pages and rewrite parameter
* Changed variable for mp_brick_additional_css filter from $css_output to null
* JS Scripts are now enqueued to show in the footer instead of header
* Smooth Scrolling and anchor points added for bricks

= 1.0.0.8 = March 22, 2014
* Removed priority of 1 from Brick size settings metabox action
* Add-on directory now links to https://moveplugins

= 1.0.0.7 = March 8, 2014
* Enqueue Magnific in normal wp_enqueue_scripts vs mp_stacks_enqueue

= 1.0.0.6 = March 8, 2014
* Prevent default event for brick edit links – wasn’t working in Firefox

= 1.0.0.5 = March 5, 2014
* Better responsive Handling
* Double click on bricks to edit them
* mp_stacks_metabox becomes mp_stacks_size_metabox
* Content Type Margins added to size metabox

= 1.0.0.4 = March 5, 2014
* Added context to footer css to prevent double style tags in footer

= 1.0.0.3 = March 5, 2014
* Attached Brick CSS to footer instead of scanning posts for shortcodes

= 1.0.0.2 = February 23, 2014
* Upgraded Security using Nonces for Ajax
* Fix wp_query to show all bricks in stack rather than posts_per_page
* Improved code documentation on Custom Post Type file
* Added 15px margins below links in Text Areas – except if last-child
= 1.0.0.1 = February 19, 2014
* Added Video Tutorials for all default Metaboxes
* Added MP Stacks Dashboard/Welcome Page
* Improved Default Responsive Styling

= 1.0.0.0 = February 10, 2014
* Original release

Change to Refund Policy

We just updated the return policy for Mint Plugins from “No Refunds” to a “30 Day Money Back Guarantee”. The initial thinking behind the “No Refunds” policy was that Digital Products can’t be returned (which is true because when you purchase you just have a copy of the code – sending it back to me is somewhat futile – haha ).

But we are very confident in the stuff Mint Plugins are releasing – so much so that we are willing to bet that you’ll love it too.

Again the concern with giving refunds for a digital product was that you could purchase, then demand a refund, and still have the code! Boom bam you got the plugin for free! Well hopefully nobody tries to do that – but it’s worth the risk.

And also, before Mint Plugins will send out a refund, you have to try and let us solve the problem you are having. If we can’t solve it, then we don’t even want your money. I would never want to sell somebody something that didn’t work. So this is your way of getting peace of mind that it does – and that your next purchase on MintPlugins.com will be one that help you to move forward.

All the best!

Cool updates for the Knapstack Theme

We just released version 1.0.5.2 of the Knapstack Theme which has some cool upgrades.

Header Upgrades:
You can now have a transparent background behind your header, set it to either scroll or stick to the top of the screen.

Footer Upgrades:
Footers have been upgraded to have their own stack! Now, all the power and control from MP Stacks can be used for the footer of your theme – using a single footer stack on every page. To use it, go to “Appearance” > “Customizer” and select the stack you wish to use for your footer.

= 1.0.5.2 = March 5, 2014
* Footer widgets are replaced with a Stack.
* Header can either be fixed or scroll
* Header background opacity option added

 

KnapStack Theme now available!

I am super excited to announce the official launch of our first Theme called “Knapstack”. We spent over 2000 hours constructing it and the MP Stacks Plugin which goes along with it. With over 50 rounds of beta testing, much planning, and over 10 different people doing active testing on their own websites, it’s safe to say that this will be the best theme you’ve ever used. (more…)

Translating A WordPress Theme or Plugin

All of our plugins and themes are all localized and translation ready here at Mint Plugins. Unfortunately, we aren’t bi-lingual people so we don’t have the knowledge to do the actual translating of the plugins and themes.

But if you are and can do translations into your language, we’d love to hear from you! Here are some steps to help you get started with translating.

(more…)

Backups on a mac.

I do a lot of work on my Mac using a MAMP install. All of my code is written, tested, and stored here.

I made a major mistake today when testing the new beta version of WordPress – I overwrote my wp-content folder in WordPress! Unfortunately, there is no going back after this happens. Even Edit > Undo wasn’t going to work because I moved/replaced too many files.

The only option I had at that point was to bite the bullet, accept my losses, and revert to my latest backup – which was from 2 weeks ago. So, while a huge pain, 2 weeks of work lost isn’t the end of the world.

(more…)

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