Beaver Builder has released more news about their upcoming plugin and theme releases and 3rd party developers have been busy with their own new updates. Here’s a rundown of the latest and greatest…

Beaver Tunnels 2.0

The awesome plugin, Beaver Tunnels just updated to version 2.0 and got a total brand makeover and a new website too. This is one bit of software we could not do without and the new updates extend the power of Tunnels even further. The new Tunnels includes an updated user interface in the admin back end making it easier to define display rules. There are a few new display conditions including page types, cust0m post types and time-based conditionals. If you’re running Beaver Builder in a white label environment, Beaver Tunnels now respects those settings too. More about Beaver Tunnels on our product page and watch David Waumsley’s YouTube review.

Free theme from Beaver World

Beaver World released an amazing new e-commerce theme for Beaver Builder users called BSHOP based on WooCommerce. The theme is very clean and well laid out and incorporates a nifty cost filter too. If you want to set up shop quick, with a minimal, modern, responsive e-commerce theme, then download the free BSHOP theme now.

Subscribe Form Stylesheets

The clever folks at BeaverAddons have created a simple series of CSS stylesheets for getting those subscribe forms looking great. Like their contact form stylesheets, these CSS rules are brilliant for adding unique effects to your forms. Check out the 5 free styles here.

Beaver Builder October Update

Beaver Builder released an Alpha version of the soon to be released plugin version 1.9. The full release notes are available here. One of the top requested features included in this release is columns in columns. Included is a great update to the responsive settings for row, column and module padding and margin settings allowing for greater control of elements at varying device sizes. Here’s Justin with a rundown of the new features…

Powerpack updates and Discounts

There is no doubting the power of Powerpack and up until the 30th of October you can get PowerPack at 30% discount. That’s $49 Unlimited Sites, 35+ Modules, 20+ Page Templates & 100+ Row Templates, Support & Updates for 1 Year – bargain! Powerpack just updated to Version 1.1.8 and it now includes a new module called content tiles. Tiles displays a block of posts in a grid view with overlay post titles and comes with a few pre-defined layouts – great for blog headers.

Ultimate Addons Releases new templates

Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder keeps getting more and more powerful and the recent update to Version 1.3.1 brings a new cloud-based template library which includes 40 page templates and 195 section templates. The new Cloud Templates library makes downloading and adding the pre-built page and section designs to your site really simple and reduces the plugin weight enormously.

NEW! Creative Beaver

Creative Beaver is a new initiative by Martin Nickisch Conde that aims to crowdsource ideas for Beaver Builder templates. Martin will build out designs from the submitted requests based on their support through upvotes. It’s a novel approach to creating resources for Beaver Builder and helps to ensure that the community gets relevant resources that include unique ideas. Cast your vote and add your ideas here.

Interviews by David Waumsley

There is no doubt that Beaver Builder makes running a web development agency a whole lot easier. However, web development is an extremely competitive and tough business, requiring dedication, nerves and perseverance to achieve success. David’s interview series takes a look at the workings of a number Beaver Builder based agencies, offering an incredible insight into the success of each of these businesses. In the latest interview, David talks to Dutch-based developer Peter Luit about his work and how his incredible curiosity enables him to get to grips with the real issues facing modern web development.

BeyondBeaver

Finally, Grant over at BeyondBeaver has updated his site – it’s looking amazing and you’ll find plenty of great Beaver Builder tips and tricks on his blog and awesome YouTube channel. Grant publishes plenty of great child themes and templates to help you get your own site up and running fast. Check them out here.

Wrap Up!

That’s it, folks! If you’re enjoying the many festivals around the world, play safe and have fun and for those of you enjoying the first buds of spring – send us some sunny smiles!

Beaver World

First up is a host of useful plugins from developer Chinmoy Kumar Paul. Chinmoy released a number of new plugins and modules, most notably his new Checkerboard module that allows you to create cool checkerboard style post archives. Find out more about Checkboard on our product review page.

Hot off the press is Chinmoy’s new Beaver Lister that adds useful information to the WordPress admin page and post lists telling you if the Beaver Builder page builder is active and which modules are included on the page. Super useful! Chinmoy is adding new products all the time, solving some of the problems community members face when developing in Beaver Builder.

Hot off the press is Chinmoy’s new Beaver Lister that adds useful information to the WordPress admin page and post lists telling you if the Beaver Builder page builder is active and which modules are included on the page. Super useful! Chinmoy is adding new products all the time, solving some of the problems community members face when developing in Beaver Builder. Check out the Beaver World products pages here.

CobaltApps

Next up is the new Beaver Extender plugin from CobaltApps. Eric Hamm has been a long time developer in the Genesis community and his Genesis extender plugin is a popular utility used by Genesis developers and designers. His ‘port’ of the extender plugin over to the Beaver Builder Theme comes at a time when many Genesis developers are looking to take the BB Theme on full time. Beaver Extender adds enormous power to your theme customisation capabilities – check out the video from Eric Hamm here and read more about the plugin on our product page.

BeaverAddons

BeaverAddons released a set of 10 contact form CSS presets to add a little pizzaz to the standard Beaver Builder forms. Add the relevant CSS classes in the advanced tab of your form modules, add the CSS provided by BeaverAddons and see your forms magically turn into unique and stylish elements. Happily, these work on the Contact and Subscribe form modules for Beaver Builder. Get them here.

Beaver Brains

Whilst we’re on Modules, have you seen our new modules page? Every Beaver Builder module is listed along with great examples of how you can achieve unique looks with each of them. We’ll be adding PowerPack and Ultimate Addons modules too. Check out the module page here.

Ultimate Beaver

Thierry Pigot, the developer behind Ultimate Beaver products has released a new plugin called Custom Post Type Template which allows you to create re-usable templates for custom post types. The plugin makes it possible to drag and drop standard WordPress fields along with Advanced Custom Fields to build up powerful single and archive page templates for custom posts. It’s a very powerful solution and by the looks of things, very simple to implement. We’ll be adding our review soon.

Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder

Coming this week (today perhaps?) is Ultimate Addons‘ awesome collection of Cloud Templates. This is a hugely anticipated update to the Ultimate Addons suite and will include over 30 page templates, all hosted in the cloud and ready to download at the touch of a button. lead Developer, Sujay Pawar has released a video showing the feature over on his YouTube channel.

That’s all for this week, folks! I hope these additions to the Beaver Builder community will give you super power web design strength!

One of the most common questions asked about the Beaver Builder theme is how you create unique header and footer designs for your site. Whilst the customiser does offer some powerful options, it’s not a complete solution. Access to further design options is not available in the Beaver Builder theme as of now – the only way round it is to set your page template to ‘no headers and footers’ and design the complete blank canvas accordingly.

That’s fine when you have just one page to do, but when you need to make amendments to a whole bunch of pages, you could find yourself spending a lot of time doing so.

That’s where ‘BB Header Footer‘ makes thing easy. Instead of using the ‘No Header/Footer’ template and then adding headers and footers manually, use this plugin to ‘replace’ your header and footer with one you’ve pre-designed. The plugin allows you to select an alternative header or footer from a pre-design Beaver Builder page layout or template and apply it to your whole site. At the moment it’s only able to replace your headers and footers site wide, but Nikhil tells me that they’re working on an update to the plugin that will allow you to choose unique designs on a page by page basis.

Removing the default header may seem like a bad idea as you lose structured markup which Google uses to understand the content and layout of your pages. However Nikhil has confirmed that his plugin will retain the markup generated by the default headers.

So how do you go about replacing the Beaver Builder theme header using this plugin? Here’s a step by step guide. In the screenshot below we’re going to replace the standard header and navigation elements, outlined in yellow, with our new design.

Step One – Create a header template

In the screenshot below we’ve created a new template called ‘New Header’ that will be used to replace our standard BB theme header. If you don’t see ‘Templates in the WordPress admin sidebar, make sure you have them enabled in the Beaver Builder Page Builder options under Settings –> Page Builder –> Templates tab.

Step 2 – Design your new header

Using the Beaver Builder page builder, design your new header using the modules you need. In this example, we’re going to make our header row background colour yellow and we’re going to add a menu and social network icons to the design.

Step 3 – Publish your new design

In the screenshot below, you can see the default header and navigation menu and below it our new, very yellow design that will replace it.

Step 4 – Choose your new template

Head over to Settings –> Page Builder –> BB header Footer tab and from the header drop down, choose your new template. Click on Save Settings to enable BB Header Footer to apply the template as your new site wide header.

Step 5 – Check design

Head to the front end of your site and you should now see that the new template design replaces your standard Beaver Builder header.

Nikhil’s plugin makes replacing standard header and footer designs really easy and with updates coming to the plugin, we should start to see further customisation options available too. A great start and we’re looking forward to seeing how the plugin grows.

For support options, use Nikhil’s Github page located here.

Beaver Brains is hosted on DigitalOcean alongside a number of other sites we manage for clients. For $10 per month we manage 15 client sites including Beaver Brains off of one DigitalOcean server, all managed through the simple and efficient ServerPilot interface. With a £30 / month total spend, we’re saving tons of money and keeping our site running super smooth!

Setting up a new server to host your website can be a complex process of installing and tweaking PHP, Nginx / Apache, MySQL and WordPress. Getting the right combination of settings, including HTTP/2 and caching can make or break your site. ServerPilot optimises your server and application stacks to give you the best performance possible and it does this silently in the background without any need for intervention. Using modern technologies such as HTTP/2, Nginx and PHP-FPM, your server is configured using industry standards that will deliver a fast, reliable environment for your web hosting.

ServerPilot makes the difficult process of setting up complex server environments extremely easy, ensuring that you can host multiple WordPress instances on one server maintaining excellent performance.

We’ve been using ServerPilot in combination with DigitalOcean since we started Beaver Brains. Setting up the system was a simple process of creating a bare-bones Ubuntu server in DigitalOcean and then connecting the server in ServerPilot’s management interface. All you need to get started is the IP Address and Root Password of the server and ServerPilot will then install it’s own user on the server to manage the installation of application stacks and additional users. ServerPilot installs all the necessary stacks you’ll need for hosting websites, including Nginx, PHP, MySQL and others and even includes protocols for CloudFlare.

There are other companies offering similar services – try EasyEngine for Nginx webservers or Cloudways for managed cloud hosting on Amazon, Google, DigitalOcean, or Vultr.

Once ServerPilot has made a successful connection to your DigitalOcean server, it gets to work installing the stacks required to drive your application. Before we go adding apps to our server, we always create additional system users so that we can segment our customers and avoid each of them ‘seeing’ other client folders on the server if they log in via FTP.

Create System Users

Creating users is a simply a matter of providing a username and password and once they are set up, you can then assign them to any apps you make later on in the process. ServerPilot has no option to move apps between system users so it’s vital that you create the user before you set up your app. Moving it later is NOT an option. ServerPilot places the web root folder under the home directory of the system user you create so be sure you choose the correct user…

Installing Apps

After you’ve created your system users, you’ll want to move on to creating your app. Creating an application is really easy – just click on the green ‘+Create App’ button in the top right corner of the screen and tell ServerPilot the name and domain of the app.

If this is a WordPress installation, tick the checkbox and fill in the basic information requirements to get it installed. ServerPilot has a choice of five PHP runtime versions from 5.4 all the way up to 7.1 Release Candidate. We opt for PHP 7.0 and keep this consistent if we add additional WordPress Apps to this server later on.

When you set up the server, you’ll add a domain to your app – e.g. ‘example.com’ and later on you can add additional sub-domains like ‘www.example.com’. One of the great features of ServerPilot is the ability to add unrelated domains to your app so that in effect you can run traffic on example.com and anotherexample.com, each of these being correctly interpreted on the server and maintained in the URL address bar of your browser and in WordPress’ General settings.

In fact, even if you just have one domain listed, ServerPilot greys out the setting in WordPress’ General settings area so that you are forced to use ServerPilot’s management interface to make these changes. This ensures that if you do decide to change the domain of your WordPress website, all the changes are made at the server level, eliminating possible domain issues and errors.

Additional Databases

ServerPilot creates a MySQL database and tables for each of your WordPress installations and you’ll need to install PHPMyAdmin on the server if you want direct access for any reason. The alternative is to allow remote connections so that you can use tools such as MySQL Workbench to administer the database.

You can also create additional databases for your ServerPilot App by simply giving it  name, a username and password.

SSL & AutoSSL

Setting up SSL on your app is supremely easy. You can either provide your own SSL certificates or let ServerPilot issue and re-issue certificates automatically for you using Let’s Encrypt. Just visit the app you want to install SSL on and click the ‘Enable AutoSSL‘ option. This installs the SSL certificate and manages the amendments to your WordPress and Server installation to ensure traffic to and from your site is encrypted with Let’s Encrypts certificates.

We use AutoSSL on all of our applications and if domains change from .dev to live .com, ServerPilot automatically renews the certificate and your app takes up the changes with minimal fuss.

Domain management and AutoSSL is a pretty neat benefit – when developing sites you can move from a staging to live environment with next to no hassle.

For additional information on ServerPilot’s SSL options, visit their documentation pages.

Monitoring and Reports

On our Coach plan we’re limited to viewing performance stats at the server level. If you need to monitor individual application resources you’ll need to sign up to the Business plan. Having CPU, Memory and Bandwidth checks at app level is great if you need to monitor individual client sites. Otherwise server level monitoring should be fine.

Pricing

ServerPilot offers a free plan giving you the ability to install unlimited servers and websites. However, you won’t get free SSL certificates or HTTP/2 deployment or server health statistics. The Coach and Business plans offer all of this and with Business you’ll also get high priority support and application stats and logs.

Conclusion

ServerPilot’s interface is clean and minimal and whilst we wish there were some additional features, like moving sites between user accounts, we think the overall experience is really great. Performance has been excellent and coupled with Cloudflare, everything seems to work really well. We would definitely recommend this setup for hosting and maintaining a few WordPress sites on one server.

DigitalOcean sets themselves apart by offering a modern and clean interface that’s easy to understand and navigate. Their command centre makes configuring cloud servers and development frameworks simple and intuitive. There is an active section dedicated to developer community topics and they have a number of useful integrations that make managing whole servers really easy.

Creating a DO Droplet

When you go to create a Droplet in DigitalOcean, you choose between a number of different server options including, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, Debian, CoreOs and CentOS or you can simply spin up a ‘one-click’ app, of which there are many.

We tend to spin up a simple Ubuntu server and then head over to ServerPilot to manage the installation and administration of multiple client websites on one server.

The DigitalOcean Droplet start screen

However is you prefer to spin up a WordPress instance straight away it’s as easy as clicking on the WordPress option and DO will do the rest. Whatever you choose, DO will give you the option of sizing your server according to your needs – either adjust the CPU and RAM, or adjust CPU, RAM and Disk in one process. They do make it really easy to resize your droplet, but you need to power down the server to do so.

Global Datacentres

DO offer a number of global datacentre regions so you can choose hosting closest to you or your audience. Options include New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Toronto and Bangalore. Sadly no South American or African locations as yet.

You can select additional options like setting up a private network, regular backups, IPv6 and you can add an SSH key for accessing the server over SSH and SFTP.

The nice thing about the server setup routine is that you can create a droplet and deploy multiple versions of it on the fly.

Monitoring and Backup

Once your droplet is set up you’ll have access to public bandwidth, CPU and Disk charts giving you an overview of the performance of your machine. DO allow you to setup a regular backup of the entire server (additional $4.00 per month for our server) or you can create your own server snapshot on the fly. You don’t need to power down your server to take a snapshot but data integrity could be compromised if you have a lot of traffic, comments and posts being added by clients whilst the snapshot is being made.

Block Storage

A new feature, SSD Block Storage ranging from 1GB to 16TB, gives you the opportunity of adding additional ‘volumes’ to your server to manage additional data. Volumes are charged at a rate of $0.10 per GB per month. For example, if you create a 100GB volume, you would be charged an additional $10 per month. Currently New York and San Francisco only.

Domain Management

DigitalOcean domain management is one of the cleanest interfaces for managing complex domain setups we’ve seen. Updates, like those weve seen on Amazon’s Route53 are super quick to update which is useful if you’re working with a new live WordPress install. Quick global DNS updates are a must!

User Accounts & Billing

One of the great features of DO, is their user, organisation and team accounts. You can sign up with your own username, or sign up using your organisation details and then add additional users to your account to help manage the hosting account.

Each account holder can be assigned an ‘Owner’, ‘Member’ or ‘Biller’ role allowing you to segment their activities according to need.

The billing page, like every other page on DigitalOcean is quite simply ‘crafted’ – in fact, the whole DO experience is super minimal and clean which really helps when you trying to find stuff.

You can pay with a credit or debit card or PayPal and you can set billing alerts anytime your account monthly usage exceeds the amount you stipulate.

Support

DigitalOcean’s support centre is loaded with really useful articles. You can learn about DO functions and services through their support pages and they also publish great articles about hosting, servers, computing languages and more on their developer community site.

DigitalOcean has one of the neatest tutorial sites we’ve seen – articles are laid out really well with great screenshots and you can add comments and share articles on social networks just like any other blog. The knowledge base is a true example of how to do it right.

We’ve never had any reason to use the support ticketing system, so I sent a support ticket just to test it out. I received an immediate acknowledgement email and I’ll update you on how long it took to receive the response. UPDATE: The response time was 20 minutes.

Conclusion

DigitalOcean is not just a pretty face – in our experience hosting builderbrains.com and 10 other client sites on their servers, we’ve never had a day’s issue. Functionally, DO provides all the tools we need and performance wise – well we run builderbrains.com 2gb / 2cpu server with 40gb disc space alongside other sites and we do it without any caching on our server or in WordPress. You tell me if builderbrains.com is slow?

All in all, we love the clean layout, excellent functionality and superb resources available on DO and would definitely recommend them to anyone asking.

New versions of out Toolset plugins are now out! Go and check the great new features! https://t.co/FHGepbhRwr #WordPress

— Toolset – WordPress Development For Non-Coders (@ToolsetPlugins) August 25, 2016

This new version of the plugin brings a whole lot of power to designers using Toolset and Beaver Builder, combining both plugins into a powerful design suite that extends the usage of standard Beaver Builder templates. Toolset recently announced a similar integration with Visual Composer and this new update brings the same great features for Beaver Builder users.

Using the plugin

Check out this video from Diane Laidlaw – Diane published this video recently using the beta version of the Toolset plugin and shows just how powerful this new update is for Beaver Builder users.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJBn6q0fRo8

Dragging WordPress and ACF fields in Beaver Builder to create a custom single post template.

Displaying Fields

The plugin will make it a simple task of displaying Wordpress and Advanced Custom Fields on your layouts using ‘Field WP’ and ‘Field ACF’ modules added to the page builder. Simply drag and drop Field WP modules onto your layout and select available fields from the dropdown and for a completely customised solution, drag the ‘Field ACF’ module and select your custom field by partial type to select.

Selecting Templates

Once your single template is set up, it’s just a matter of selecting it in the new ‘Template’ tab in the Beaver Builder admin settings. Not to be confused with Beaver Builder’s own ‘Templates’ tab, the new tab allows you to select custom templates for your post types. An extremely elegant and simple solution.

One of the challenges I always face with using custom fields is the need to hard code child theme templates for use in custom post types. Having these fields available within the Beaver Builder page builder is an exciting option and opens up a wide range of possibilities for designing complex databases and layouts quickly. How ACF repeater and relationship fields would work is not yet known but I am sure that it will be just as elegant a solution as the standard fields demonstrated.

An archive template is in the works too so you’ll be able to display custom post archives with just as much elegance.

Watch the full video on YouTube.