Visual Composer
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- hotroddy
I've come across two wordpress sites that use Visual Composer to build our their pages.
I don't understand the benefits. Can someone enlighten me please?
- prophetone1
drag and drop. lots of components. think of it as building out the content of a page with the power to arrange and style it in a custom way.
- sted0
it's a shortcode based wysiwyg editor, injects the post content with (or wherever you want to use it) with predefined shortcodes what you can modify. has multiple plugins, you can build a complete site just using this tool. but it's slow and robust.
- sted1
you can create templates, grid elements what can pull the data from the pages/posts/etc without writing code.
- hotroddy0
I see. Thanks
- prophetone1
Very useful if you think you'll need to bust out of a theme's restrictive design or want to have more control over how to craft a page's content layout, like splitting the page up in half or thirds or quarters and then dragging elements into each section, etc., setting dividers, font styles, animations etc.
You could body it onto the vanilla simplest of WP themes and build out something that's modern and complex if you want to.
It's worth the $35 to check it out and see what it can do if you figure you'll use it or bill it out.
- prophetone0
Visual Composer has a Youtube page as well which provides a good idea of what you're getting into with the interface/features.
- Salarrue0
It also allow you to create templates from the created layouts.
- fadein110
It can be very useful in some instances.
You can create complex layouts in the content area of any theme and it has a lot of useful stuff built in.
I have built 2 sites using it - was really against it initially but it does have its uses.
Teaching it to clients is not so practical though.
- sted0
low-profile clients ask for this all the time, sometimes it's good but it has some issues, so there are a few things about vc what I wanted to share, but the other day I was exhausted so:
- Generates really ugly code for the front-end (classes on everything, unnecessary nested objects, etc)
- Because of the shortcode processing page-load time increases
- Hard to modify individual elements (styles, logic)
- 1 wrong click and you can spend days figuring out what's wrong.
- Editors get way too much control over the content
- Forget proper seo- - 1st point depends on how you structure stuff.
- page load is increased but marginally - just shortcodes which all wpress sites use
- Very easy to modifyfadein11 - individual elements via CSS because they all have classes - never had a prob doing this
- Never spent days figuring something out but yes things can go wrongfadein11 - - yep agreed - not good for clients with little web knowledge
- SEO - not really sure about this - just outputs HTMLfadein11 - which you have full control of so no need for it to be an issue.fadein11
- fadein11 grid element, locked to a specific post category, i can't add or modify the data source. that was my last :)sted
- and try for example add random colors to the image carousel :) (you can't w/o messing with the vc js)sted
- ah I see - I haven't delved that deep with stuff - thought you meant styling.fadein11
- - 1st point depends on how you structure stuff.
- pockets0
i heard the latest wp update breaks some visual composer sites but ive yet to run across an issue