We believe in solving situations with simple solutions that leave a long term positive impact with our users.
Today we’re unveiling an addition to Conductor called, Note, a simple live edit text widget for WordPress.
This is about as simple as it gets. You add a Note widget to your registered sidebar, you start typing within the context of your website, and then you click save. Done and done.
It’s never been more natural to leave bits of text, links, and copy throughout your WordPress website. Selfishly, I’d like to explore how we see Note impacting Conductor customers and WordPress users alike.
Using Note for live text editing
A lot of folks compare Conductor to other page builders on the market.
On the surface they might look similar, but, that’s just not fair to other solutions out there. When you’re using Conductor, you are forced to stay within the lines of your chosen theme. On the other hand, most page builders give you expansive options to create your own layouts from the ground up. Perfect for the audience that wants a solution that starts from scratch, with infinite options and plenty of choices ahead.
Note is no different than Conductor.
We’re allowing live front-end editing of text and copy via a widget, which you can place within the registered sidebars of your theme. You can’t click and add this text anywhere on the site — just where the theme author wants it.
This also means that you can extend Note by using Conductor for custom layouts and widget placement. Again, not giving you infinite choices, but with clear concise controlled layouts and usability.
So how do we hope this leaves a lasting impression?
Experience the front-end customizer
The front-end customizer is still a fairly new experience. Most WordPress users aren’t building out their site’s content in the front-end. It’s just not natural yet and arguably, might never be.
Building rich-content blog posts, over 2,000 words, with additional videos and photos, might not be best suited for the front-end editing. And that’s okay, it’s why products like Aesop story engine exist. However, if you want to leave bits of copy and text throughout the site and publish it within the context of your design — now you can.
And I think this is the best use case.
For example: How do you know wether or not the paragraph of text you created in the widget dashboard will look good on a particular page? You don’t. You click back and forth and hit refresh until you get the desired word length just right.
A bit of a jarring experience if you ask me.
Note doesn’t get in your way and invites you to just start typing your desired copy and call to actions without forcing you to think.
Download Note
So do you want to get your hands on Note and try it out? Be our guest!
You can download from WordPress.org here
You can also get it from GitHub here. This is where we’ll also officially support the free plugin as well.
The future roadmap for the plugin is still to be determined, but you can expect to see deeper integration with Conductor and our custom layout builders. Until then, give it a shot and let us know what you think in the comments!