One of the frequent requests from our customers has been to have a custom landing page in order to showcase what their network site is about.
That got us to a point where we were imagining an elegant way to build any number of custom pages (not just the landing page) for each site. These custom pages could serve any purpose - landing, marquee, sectional, showcase etc. We called these "Featured pages".
And more importantly, customers currently need to maintain 2 systems - one for the static website build using Wordpress or fully custom, etc and one for the community (provided as a managed service by MainCross). Why have 2 systems, rather than a superbly integrated website that operates in a holistic way, seamlessly transitioning from "website" to "network site"?
Our Network CMS is meant for a large set of requirements vastly beyond the capabilities of a generic website builder. Hence any page builder that we deploy would need to tap into the set of real-time, interactive widgets and components that make up the MainCross system.
Apparently, we needed a page builder on steroids
- It should at a minimum achieve the results one can get with various page builders out there - eg Divi for Wordpress is extraordinary, and I've heavily used that in the past
- It should work intuitively even for the lay person who does not necessarily want to muck around with shortcodes (here's looking at you Wordpress), or copy-paste snippets of code all over the place.
- It should be seamless integrated into the current flows and not feel like a hack
- Most importantly, it should allow various existing (and future) MainCross blocks to be added to the page with minimal effort.
- And it should be reasonably performant
Well, we achieved all the above!
So today, I'm delighted to announce that we've launched a new visual, drag and drop, page builder and block editor (aka the Page Builder as opposed to the Long Form Editor).
It can create the most gorgeous responsive pages, and various MC blocks can be added - polls / surveys / quizzes, channels, feed, contact form, posts and so on. All these are full interactive widgets.
Its in beta at the moment, but its enabled on all the networks and you can give it a whirl. Any Featured Page will use the new Page Builder.
Further, any Featured Page once created can be set as the network site landing page - thus achieving the customer request that started this chain.
Templating system
The new Page Builder is also the start of the MC templating system - a way for network Heroes to create page templates and use those for display instead of the current UI (theme).
Stay tuned for when we launch this later this year.
