Carrington Build – Will It Revolutionize WordPress Development?
A few days ago, Alex King announced a new WordPress product called Carrington Build. It is described as a “better way to manage WordPress content” and allows users to create custom page layouts without any programming knowledge.
For a better visual of how it works, check out this 1:21 intro video.
Read on to see my review, along with a screencast, information on pricing, and some other thoughts.
Screencast
You probably got a good idea of how Carrington Build works from the video above, but here’s a screencast from me.
How To Get It
I should clarify now that Carrington Build is not free. The pricing structure is a bit complicated so Alex King dedicated an entire post on the topic.
Here are the pricing options:
- Carrington Business Theme – A theme which showcases Carrington Build. This is designed for end users and is priced at $149.
- Carrington Build Developer Edition – This option is designed for developers working on paid client projects, and is used on a single site and is priced at $499.
- Carrington Build Royalty Edition – This option allows commercial WordPress theme or plugin developers to include Carrington Build in their products. It is priced at $15 or 10% of each sale.
Carrington Build isn’t a typical WordPress plugin or theme, and the pricing obviously reflects that being much more expensive than pretty much any other commercial WordPress product I’ve seen.
Commercial Themers?
I have to admit, the most interesting option on the pricing structure would be the “Carrington Build Royalty Edition” which allows other commercial developers to integrate Build into their themes or plugins.
I wonder when we’ll start seeing “Carrington Build-friendly” themes being sold? Most popular commercial themes already do include different page layouts, however nothing close to the flexibility of something like Carrington Build.
Integrating Carrington Build into already great themes would add instant value and allow users to customize their sites with nearly unprecedented flexibility.
Maybe even popular and established theme frameworks like Genesis by StudioPress could get in the game by developing something like a “sample child theme” which integrates Carrington Build into it.
This way, users who wanted the added Build functionality could purchase the child theme as an addon, more sales for the commercial theme company, times $15 back to Crowd Favorite. Everyone wins.
I’d imagine the new child theme route would be the best for already established commercial theme frameworks as it might be kind of tricky to offer a new version of the original framework with Build considering a lot of commercial theme companies offer free upgrades, and you’d probably need to pay Crowd Favorite a ton of money upfront for something not every user might want or need.
iThemes Builder
When I first heard of Carrington Build, the first thing I thought of was the undeniable similarity with another popular WordPress product, iThemes’ Builder theme.
I’m not sure if these two products would play nice together. My first thought was both of them combined would be a bit redundant as they both seem to have a similar “building block” stacking style.
Benjamin Bradley tweeted some differing thoughts on an iThemes Builder + Carrington Build combination.
For more information, check out my Builder theme review (there’s a screencast too).
Conclusion
First of all I want to note that I was not asked or solicited in any way to do a review on Carrington Build. I realize it’s a paid product and it may not be for everyone but I genuinely thought it was a really cool WordPress innovation and wanted to share it with my readers.
- Will it revolutionize WordPress theme development?
- Do you think it will be integrated in other commercial WordPress products sooner or later?
- Would you use something like this for your clients and would they find value in this?
- Would you use Carrington Build on your own personal sites or is pricing too much of a deterrent?
I’d really love to hear your thoughts on Carrington Build in the comments.
Looking for web hosting?
Question: What's the best type of web hosting?
Answer: The kind you don't have to worry about.
And that's precisely why I recommend HostGator. I've been using them myself for years and they've been nothing short of superb.
Fast load times, great support, WordPress-friendly, and good prices. Not much more you can ask for.
New customers can get 25% off of any HostGator web hosting package with the coupon: themelab25percentoff
Note: I am a HostGator affiliate, but that doesn't make my recommendation any less genuine.
Wow.
My head is spinning with possibilities now. Would love to see the royalty add-on integrated with popular frameworks. I usually develop sites as a child theme in a framework so my clients can get upgrades for free down the line, being able to tuck in Build as a royalty add-on into those child themes would rock.
Hey Adam, totally agree with you. Like I went over in the post, using a child theme addon would be a win/win for all parties.
I’d really like to see commercial theme frameworks take advantage of this.
Hey dude, that was a great video… very well done. I like the idea, it seems like it would be helpful to a lot of people.
I would be interested in seeing the code it outputs though. It seems like a lot of times things like this put out junk code.
Hey Galen, I tend to agree with you that the code output by these sort of things aren’t necessarily the most efficient way of going about it.
Looking at the demo site it appears they have some really big random class and ID names, like
<div id="cfct-block-d5d9648aa643312b2d2c8a3d7f07a696" class="cfct-block block-1 cfct-block-e">for example.That’s right, Leland. We generate a unique ID for every row and module but we do have some rhyme and reason to the class names. This is all covered in the documentation (members-only).
Hey Leland, thanks for taking the time to check out Carrington Build and the Carrington Business theme. Your video was great, we hope to add more in-depth tours much like yours, kudos to you.
To one of your points, yes, Build can be extended beyond pages to work with any post type (including the default ‘posts’). Hope that helps!
Hey Devin, thanks for stopping by and clarifying those points. Glad you liked the screencast.
Pretty slick. I tend to believe that Mr. King has done his homework to the best of his ability. His prior tools were well done as well. Both videos are worth watching imo.
I’m just thinking out loud when I ask, how many layers away from programming bliss are the users now?
Thanks for the video! Less fancy then the Carringtons’ one, but arguably much more revealing.
Question: What did you use to make the video so incredibly sharp and clean?
Screenr
Damn! What a tool! I thought it was yet another “youtube” clone. Thanks for introducing it to me, I’m blown away!
The plugin is 100% GPL so doesn’t have to pay CrowFavorite a ton of money unless you want to. Referring to the royalty package.
Hey Leland. I just wanted to share a bit of news with you (there will be a post on our blog soon). We will be offering Carrington Build in a few new themes from UpThemes within the next few months. When we saw the level of customization users could have within pages (you can enable it for posts and custom post types as well) we jumped at the chance to sign an agreement with Crowd Favorite to integrate Carrington Build into our themes. We are extremely excited at the possibilities moving forward.