Porting WP plugins/apps
Permalink
I am working with a client who currently uses Wordpress/Graffiti along with the Thrive Leads subsystem. After about a month trying to fix what was broken and what they wanted I threw in the towel. I had not worked with Wordpress for some time, but it's actually gotten worse from what I remember :/ As usual, they depended on about 30 plugins to mutate the blog framework into something it was never intended to do.
I had a meeting with the mgt team and pitched/demo-ed C5 to them, making it very clear in about two weeks I could rebuild their entire site from scratch; half the time it took me to fix just their homepage. They were sold - sorta. The only hitch was, they are heavily invested in Thrive Leads, an entire subsystem for lead management for WP.
So, my questions are:
Has anyone here had any experience, or have any thoughts, on the viability of porting certain WP plugins to C5? In this case, the interface between the WPO backend and Thrive Leads seems fairly small. A fairly small API middleware, with WP-API compatible interface on one end, and C5 on the other, seems reasonable. I am wondering if anyone has tried such a thing, with... anything.
Can anyone suggest an alternative to Thrive leads for C5? I do not see any lead mgt plugins, but maybe there is another lead mgt application that can interface to C5 with perhaps a couple of utility plugins.
Is C5 speaking with any of these WP service products, like Thrive (or OptinMonster,LeadBoxer, SumoMe, Leadin, Hello Bar, OptinSkin, etc), or WooCommerce or any of the big-ticket items that seduce otherwise rational people into using WP in the first place, to convince, persuade, tempt them to port to C5?
Thanks
I had a meeting with the mgt team and pitched/demo-ed C5 to them, making it very clear in about two weeks I could rebuild their entire site from scratch; half the time it took me to fix just their homepage. They were sold - sorta. The only hitch was, they are heavily invested in Thrive Leads, an entire subsystem for lead management for WP.
So, my questions are:
Has anyone here had any experience, or have any thoughts, on the viability of porting certain WP plugins to C5? In this case, the interface between the WPO backend and Thrive Leads seems fairly small. A fairly small API middleware, with WP-API compatible interface on one end, and C5 on the other, seems reasonable. I am wondering if anyone has tried such a thing, with... anything.
Can anyone suggest an alternative to Thrive leads for C5? I do not see any lead mgt plugins, but maybe there is another lead mgt application that can interface to C5 with perhaps a couple of utility plugins.
Is C5 speaking with any of these WP service products, like Thrive (or OptinMonster,LeadBoxer, SumoMe, Leadin, Hello Bar, OptinSkin, etc), or WooCommerce or any of the big-ticket items that seduce otherwise rational people into using WP in the first place, to convince, persuade, tempt them to port to C5?
Thanks
Just my 2 cents but here goes.
I've ported WP plugins to C5 in the past and although many core functions in one have equivalents in the other, it's not always that clear-cut. Compounded with the fact that, in the WP world, the code can be very convoluted with front-end stuff littered all over the back-end code, it makes things messy at best.
And sometimes there is just no equivalent.
Thrive headline plugin is a good example. With WP you have pages and posts and each has a set title and main content. You open your page or post and your title and content are there.
So their plugin allows you to set several titles for your page or post and AB test them and automatically select the most effective one.
But with the flexibility that C5 offers, how do you know where the title on the page comes from? Maybe it's the title attribute? Maybe it's a custom attribute? Maybe it's in the Content block? Maybe it's a page attribute in the content block? C5 doesn't force you into one mold.
So it would still be possible to port that plugin to C5 but not with a simple API interface.
It would have to be re-designed from the ground up and really all we would keep is... the idea and maybe the statistical calculation.
And don't anybody dare ask me how I know all that WP stuff ;-)
Another issue maybe is the licensing model. Everything WP is GPL and if you port it, it has to be GPL as well. Those guys are used to selling their stuff themselves or on Code Canyon where really what you are selling is support and future updates. I mean some of those commercial add-ons are available on public Github repositories because they know the value is not in protecting the code.
On the other hand, C5 sells you the code and updates for life, it also sells you support but as a well-hidden secret, and it certainly doesn't make selling your stuff yourself easy.
WP developers can do whatever they want with the WP updating system. The source of the plugin can be anywhere, on your own server if you want. You can show licensing messages before, during, and after the update process.
C5, on the other hand, doesn't allow that. If you want updates, they have to come from concrete5.org. If you want to override the core to allow updates from elsewhere, you're out of luck, it's pretty much locked unless you do some clever hack that can break with the next update.
So why would any of those WP guys who are selling their stuff by the thousands and have total freedom of where and how would want to do anything with C5 to sell a few units on somebody else's terms?