Recently I set out to see if I could find another solution for adding dynamic content. One that would allow a greater variety of sources and that would not require anything more than the Beaver Builder plugin itself. What I came up with does just that.

The background

At I’m Not Marvin, most of our work is internal applications that are tracking and reporting on workflows or other business processes built on WordPress. Beaver Builder should make it easy to create dashboards or other report pages, but the module settings for most modules are not able to receive data dynamically, which is the point of any report.

Take the Number Counter module for example. It would be a helpful module for displaying totals, but it only allows you to set a number at the time you edit the module. For a dashboard you would need this to update automatically as the data changes. I needed a way to link the Number setting to my data, that could be in custom fields (post meta) or stored within other plugins, such as Formidable Pro or Gravity Forms.

I decided the best solution would be to customize the module to accept a shortcodes instead of a static number. A shortcode gives me near universal since they are supported by WordPress and many of the major plugins already provide them for extracting data.

Another goal of this project is to avoid creating another number module if I could help it. I wanted to see if I could customize Beaver Builders module instead. Not that this wouldn’t be a worthy purpose for a new module, but why add an additional module if all I really want to do is add a little extra functionality to what’s already built-in?

Overriding built-In modules

Beaver Builder has provided a method of overriding any of their built-modules that is so simple that the documentation explains it perfectly in a mere eight sentences!

While this still requires at least an intermediate level of web development experience, it’s as easy as working with any other PHP templates in WordPress and reminds me even more of the WooCommerce template system.

Any of Beaver Builder’s built-in modules can be overridden within your theme by following these steps:

1. Create a new folder inside your theme (or child theme) folder named fl-builder.
2. Create a new folder within your theme’s fl-builder folder named modules. (fl-builder/modules)
3. Copy the module you want to override from wp-content/plugins/bb-plugin/modules to your theme’s fl-builder/modules folder. ( as in fl-builder/modules/numbers for my example)

That’s really all there is to setting up the folder and files in your theme so that when you customize them, your changes will override the built-in module. Just find the module you want, copy it’s folder and all the file within it to your theme, and make your changes to these copied files.

This is what I did to get started with my customized Numbers module. Have you spotted it in action yet?

Dynamic data in membership CTA

For my test project, I edited the Number Counter module to add a new drop down field to the General options called Number Source. Now I can select either Static or Shortcode.

If the default option of Static is selected, the other settings remain exactly the same as the before and the I can enter a static number in the Number field.

By selecting the Shortcode option, the Number field changes to a field called Shortcode where, you guessed it, I can enter any shortcode that will produce a number. In fact to be safe, if the field ends up being anything but a number, the module just falls back to using the static Number field.

This article is not meant to be a code tutorial. Rather than getting into the specifics of my changes to the PHP and JavaScript for my test project, I will make my files available for members to download at the end of the article.

You can see my test project in action up in the site header where the bar graph shows the total Beaver Brains members!

One more thing

There is a down side to this that is worth taking note of. By overriding the built-in plugin, you are taking ownership of it. If there are changes made to a module you have copied to your theme folder in the future, they will not be applied to the version in your theme folder.

How did you come to WordPress? For many in the WordPress community, especially the do-it-yourself-ers who have no interest except to maintain their own website, you were using WordPress to blog before you ever considered customizing the theme or making unique pages. For the website designer or developer, however, our path to discovery tends to be driven by the needs of our customers.

My discovery started in about 2008 with a brother asking me which I thought was better for him to use for his own site, Joomla or WordPress. I was building Facebook apps at the time and hadn’t been building sites for clients in about eight years, so I hadn’t heard of either at the time. That didn’t stop me from realizing the incredible value WordPress was for developers and it wasn’t long before I pivoted away from Facebook development to building client projects in WordPress exclusively.

It was probably four or five years later, however, before I wrote my first actual blog post. I was never a blogger, I was a developer. I didn’t have time to blog. Besides, what would I write about, I’m a boring developer. [Side note: Interesting parallel to my current excuse for why I don’t use Instagram more.]

Eventually I was pivoting away from being a freelance developer to bootstrapping an agency and started paying attention to marketing, more specifically the eventual buzz word worthy inbound-marketing.

I started adding how-to articles on my website. Usually I was explaining to myself how I did something interesting to me. They were also based in tools I used and was often a recommended developer for.

The benefit to me was not in large amounts of traffic to my blog. There’s no one in the world who understands what web developers do who would consider me a guru. But time after time, as potential clients would find me through Google searches on the issue they were having. Finding my article added credibility when they later considered hiring me.

I’ve also shared that proud moment Sal referred to in his Wordcamp talk when Google directs you back to your own article that you hadn’t even remembered writing.

Read Sal’s accompanying article for his WCUS 2016 talk, How Blogging Helps Me as a Developer.

I know I wrote about this as past tense, but I still write on. Different brands and different goals, even using better authors whenever possible, but the value of inbound marketing to the developer far outweighs the time loss.

What’s your experience been?