If You Can Dream It Up, We Can Build It

Not sure if you noticed, but I’m a wee bit late sending out the newsletter this morning. So, we’re just going to jump right in, shall we?

First up, I’d like to tell you about a forms plugin that I think is the most robust one I’ve seen so far. Yes, I love Fluent Forms still. But, this other one can do so much more.

For my Concierge clients, I’d like to run an idea by you and see what you think.

And lastly… have you ever just sat down and brainstormed what would be COOL for your website, without any limiting thoughts about what plugins exist to do it?

OK, let’s light this candle. And let’s make this week productive as hell, shall we?

The Most Robust Forms Plugin I’ve Ever Tried

Everybody needs a plugin to build and manage forms. And there’s quite a few of them out there to choose from these days, including the likes of Gravity Forms, SureForms, Fluent Forms, Contact Form 7 (which sucks), and others.

My go-to plugin for forms has been Fluent Forms. I think this plugin is fantastic and I use it all the time. But…

Is it the most robust forms plugin out there? No, it is not.

Last week, I acquired a license to a new forms plugin and I will be adding it to my arsenal. I will also be adding it to the Concierge Toolkit which means we can use it across client sites as needed.

That plugin is called WS Form. And I think it might be the most robust forms plugin I’ve ever tried.

Now, to be clear, this doesn’t mean I have “moved on” from Fluent Forms. Fluent Forms is, in many ways, easier to use and more user-friendly. But, that doesn’t mean that Fluent Forms is always the best tool. It depends on what you’re trying to do.

Fluent Forms is highly capable, however it definitely has limitations. When you hit those limitations, you end up getting into the need to custom code your own solutions. I’ve spent my share of time in the developer docs of Fluent Forms to figure out how to code up snippets that “hook” into Fluent Forms to make it do things it won’t do “out of the box”. Even something as simple as styling the forms in interesting ways gets into custom CSS that a lot of users won’t know how to do.

This is where WS Form simply has more capability. If there’s something you find that Fluent Forms can’t do built-in, there’s a good chance that WS Form CAN do it built-in.

While I’ve been aware of WS Form for a little while, the spark last week that finally got me to buy a license was a Concierge client that needed a form with a file upload field that could upload to Amazon S3. Fluent Forms has no ability to do that, since it only can upload files to a specific folder in the server file system, or the Media Library itself. Anything else requires custom coding.

WS form has an add-on with built-in support for uploading to Amazon S3. Not only that, it has add-ons for other remote storage options as well. Plug and play.

But, it definitely goes beyond that…

• Want to have a form with a dropdown field or a set of checkboxes that pulls from a custom post type dynamically? Custom code with Fluent, but WS Form has it baked in.
• Want to use a form to collect custom info as people are buying a product in WooCommerce? WS Form has that baked right in with it’s deep integration with WooCommerce. Fluent Forms has no such thing.
• Need a form with drag and drop repeater fields? WS Form can do it.

WS Form is way more capable and it allows people to get real granular about everything it does. People can take control of far more granular and detailed things with WSForm.

Now, I will say, it isn’t as easy to use. This is why Fluent Forms will work better for many. The visual interface for designing forms is easier to use and much nicer looking with Fluent Forms. WSForm looks like it was designed by a developers, so it takes some getting used to the way it works.

A full review will be forthcoming, but in short…

Fluent Forms is awesome for straightforward lead generation, opt-ins, contact forms, surveys, etc. It is awesome when working with other Fluent products. But…

WSForm shines for more complex, interactive, data-driven and even ecommerce-integrated forms. When you need a form which is more involved, WS Form would be the better tool.

Concierge Client Update

Some of the things I was working on last week on behalf of clients in Concierge are:

• Re-building a site originally built with WP Bakery into Kadence and modernizing the design along the way. I’m about to help him tweak his conversions into his service, because currently he’s just doing the “contact us for a quote” thing. Time to make his site help generate real leads.
• Coded up a solution to enable a client using Learndash to have one specific course in the Spanish language, with a custom user role for her editor to access ONLY that course to edit it, as well as changing the language strings on the Learndash buttons so only that one course shows in Spanish while the others are in English.

Those are two extreme ends of the kinds of sites I manage in Concierge. The first is a fairly simple portfolio site for a service…. while the other is a full-scale membership site with all of the bells and whistles.

The Simple Courses plugin that I have custom developed (mentioned in Issue #541) is in the testing phase. It is already installed to one client site where she is excited to use it for a coaching course she’s doing. If you’d like to test it out and break it for me, lemme know.

The WSForm plugin I discuss above is being added to the Concierge Toolkit, which means clients have no need to acquire a license in order to use it. If you think you have a need for WSForm, hit me up and we can talk about setup on your site.

Lastly, I’m always having little ideas to make Concierge even more valuable. And one of the ideas I had was a private community just for people enrolled in Concierge. In my dreams, it would become a kind of mastermind where everybody in there has a site and is looking to do things and share that common interest. Of course, across a ton of different niches because I truly have clients that run the gamut when it comes to niches.

So, if you’re a client, would you find this valuable? What would make this something you would want to be involved in? Is this the kind of thing that you think would be a great addition to Concierge?

I’d probably use FluentCommunity to do it. Because, of course I would.

WordPress News & Updates

Keyword Stuffing your domain?. Trying to get a domain that has your main keywords in it? Well, be careful. According to SEJ, Google cautions businesses against generic keyword domains. Basically, trying to stuff keywords into a domain is likely to work against you, not for you. Unique brand names will serve much better.

State of WordPress Since WPUS 24. An interesting thread on X sprouted up which asks about the general state of WordPress since Wordcamp US 2024. If you don’t remember, that’s the event where Matt Mullenweg started the entire fiasco with WP Engine. My opinion? WordPress is coasting on it’s previous inertia right now, and the Matt hissy fit has been a net negative.

Rocket.Net Gets New General Manager. My primary hosting partner, Rocket.net, has been on a major growth trajectory. Recently ranked 167 on the INC 5000 list, as well as bringing on Jessica Frick as the new GM. I remember Jessica from back in the Blogworld days… and also recently ran into her at the PressConf event in Arizona. She was working for Pressable at the time. I’m really happy to see her joining the Rocket team and I think her natural enthusiasm for the WordPress community is going to serve Rocket well in a leadership role.

FlyingPress 5.1 With Cloudflare Integration. FlyingPress is my top recommendation for WordPress performance. Combined with PerfMatters, you can do anything you need. And FlyingPress just got even better, with it’s 5.1 release offering direct Cloudflare integration for full-page caching. This will enable you to use Cloudflare’s global network to cache entire pages of your site for super-fast performance. And get this… it works with Cloudflare’s free plan!

SEOPress 9.0. The SEOPress plugin has been updated to version 9.0. New in this version is integration with Deepseek AI, performance enhancements for XML image sitemaps, more control over the AI live chat, and a few other items. Check out the full announcement.

Phased Plugin Releases. WordPress.org has released the first version of it’s phased plugin release setup…. meaning developers can delay auto-updates up to 24-hours rather than instant availability. The main purpose would be to allow developers to find and catch bugs before plugins are rolled out to everybody at once.

Elementor Moving Beyond Page Builder. Miriam Schwab, Head of WordPress at Elementor, was on the Cache Up podcast discussing how Elementor is expanding past the page builder. This includes tools like Site Mailer (for email deliverability), Image Optimizer, Ally (for accessibility), and soon Angie (the AI assistant). She also talks about how AI is playing a huge role in the future of Elementor.

Well, That’s Tacky. Wordcamp US is trying to add some perks for attendees this year… and I guess one of them is a discount at the Nike store? Walk into the Nike store in town with your conference badge and get 40% off. I dunno… this one just seems tacky to me. What next, Geico discounts?

ACF Update. Advanced Custom Fields PRO was updated to 6.5 with several quality of life improvements to the interface. Much easier to just link to the list of changes right here than to reiterate it.

SureCart Fee Reductions. SureCart has announced big changes to their fee structure, removing the extra transaction fees on things like order bumps, cart abandonment, upsells, etc. This is a good move for them.

If You Could Make Your Site Do Anything You Think Up, It Would Be…

One of the coolest things I like about building sites on WordPress is just how moldable everything is. In other words, you can make your site look like and DO almost anything you want.

With that perspective in mind, sometimes it is useful to just… brainstorm.

To just… let your imagination go.

Don’t worry about details like what plugins will work or what features they have. Just, think about it from the perspective only of what would be great to have.

• What design features would make your site much easier to use?
• What automations would help generate more sales, or simply make your life easier?
• Any cool quiz ideas to generate leads? Cool lead magnets?
• Any admin features what would make your day-to-day life easier managing members, customers, content?
• Interface changes that would make your site easier to handle? Or reduce the clicking and just save time?

Most of the time, people don’t think this way because people just seem to accept the boundaries presented to them by software and work within it. But, with WordPress, everything can be changed.

Recently, I wrote a full article on how I optimized my WordPress Admin to Turn It Into A Business Command Center. This article goes over many of the things I’ve done on my own site to turn it into a platform that suits my needs.

My site now does things I WISH I could have had work this way not long ago. It always felt like whack-a-mole trying to find the “perfect” tool to run my business the way I wanted. It didn’t exist. In many ways, I’ve turned WordPress into what I was looking for all along.

Since I wrote that article, I’ve taken things even further. For instance, now I can manage client site profiles internally and have everything on one screen. Clients can even download a dynamically generated PDF “Operating Manual” of their site. All automatic and no need for me to DO much of anything on my side.

I’ve got a form calculator idea brewing. It will be a “Cost Calculator” for people to see the real costs they’re incurring managing their website. And potentially even ROI. I’ll probably use WSForm to build that one.

Point is…

Always remember who the boss is. You get to think up ideas to further along your own strategies. And we can MAKE WordPress do it the way you that you want. There’s pretty much always a way to do that.

This is just a mindset thing.

It reminds me of the old Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Often, we end up just accepting whatever developers present to us as plugin features and we don’t think outside the box.

All I’m saying here is… be a strategic planner about your own website without any thoughts about the technical constraints. Just dream it up.

In fact, shoot me an email and let me know what those cool ideas might be. Perhaps I can help you implement them, or suggest an easy way to do it that you didn’t know existed.

Come up with your wish list.

Think about what your site can DO to automate and expand your business. Then, we work backwards on how best to execute on it.

You can have the website of your dreams. Literally.

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The WP Edge is the official weekly newsletter of the Blog Marketing Academy.