Welcome back to the 28th edition of The Lab Report!
Summer is officially over, and apparently mother earth had it marked on her calendar because we went from 28°C on Wednesday to -2°C overnight last night.
But usually the end of summer is when the tech world hits full speed, so there should be lots to cover over the next few months.
I dunno intros are hard and I’m talking about the weather – let’s get into this week’s newsletter!
🏆 How to Choose the Best WordPress Page Builder in 2022
I worked on a ‘simple’ blog post this week that ended up becoming a beast of its own.
People often ask me which page builder I think is best (including family members), but my answer is always “it depends.”
Truthfully, there is no best page builder.
There are a ton of good options these days, and which one is best all comes down to how you’ll be using the tool.
The best page builder for me generally ain’t the best page builder for my brother who builds 1-2 sites per year.
That’s why I put together an ultimate guide of things you should consider when choosing a page builder for your next project.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE.
Knowing what to look for is cool, but it still means you need to spend hours researching and testing all the different builders.
So I worked on a little WordPress Page Builder Recommendation Tool that suggests a page builder based on all the criteria listed in the blog post.
It was actually pretty tough trying to balance the importance of a question, how well I think a page builder fills that need, and my personal bias of which builders I think are best overall – but hopefully my algo works well.
Like I mentioned, there’s often more than one good option, so consider it a tool that sets you down the right path vs. being the absolute answer sent down from the gods.
Feel free to share your results in the Facebook group!
🧱 Generate Made Easy
Speaking of page builders, friend of The Lab Report Jonathan Jernigan (aka Permaslug) just launched the pre-order for his latest course Generate Made Easy.
“If you want to go from total beginner to fully adept in GeneratePress & GenerateBlocks, this course is for you. You’ll learn everything from the basic foundations to using the most powerful features like Elements, Hooks, and Global Styles.”
I know Jonathan spent an insane amount of time building his Oxygen course (I think he once told me it was almost 200 hours), so you can be pretty confident that this one will easily cover all the essentials.
If you’re considering taking the plunge and building sites on Gutenberg, GenerateBlocks and Cwicly are definitely two of my top options.
The course is on pre-order until October 4th for $197, and gets officially released on November 4th.
🎨 Supa Color Palettes
I saw this on Product Hunt this week and thought it’d be useful for anyone who designs in Figma.
Supa Palette 2.0 is an all-in-one color palette generator.
There are quite a few color palette generators available already, but usually you just get a few base colors and that’s it.
With Supa Palette, you can see the color systems from popular brands, go through 29k ready-to-use palettes, tweak each color, generate multiple shades, check for accessibility, and import them directly as a Figma style.
The UI can feel a little overwhelming at first, but there’s a lot of customizability and I’m curious to see if this will become a staple in my Figma tool belt.
If you want to play around with it, you can add it as a Figma plugin here.
They’re also running a Product Hunt launch promo where you can get a lifetime license for $44 using the code SUPA-DISCOUNT-25.
🚀 WooCommerce one step closer to loading a bit faster
Last week the WooCommerce team provided an update about their plan to move orders to their own custom database table (and not jumbled up with all your other posts and pages).
I should note that they also renamed their custom order table project to High-Performance Order Storage (HPOS) – which of course sounds a lot cooler.
Once it’s implemented it should speed up your post queries, especially for larger stores.
It should also hopefully make migrating or revamping WooCommerce stores less of a headache.
They’re currently on track for a November release with WooCommerce 7.1 if you choose to opt-in, and then become the default for WooCommerce 8.0 stores in August 2023.
💬 Closing Comments
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for reading to the end!
If you ever want to discuss any of the topics in this newsletter, I post a dedicated thread each week inside of the NewPulse Labs Facebook group.
You can also suggest any topics you think I should cover there, so be sure to join 🙂
Stay warm(?) and see you next week!
