Over the last few years I’ve loved building a team and creating great things for our clients, but I’ve missed building products. A little more than a year ago, we started work on a system that I’ve had in the back of my mind for (quite literally) years. This work has resulted our first commercial WordPress products.
Today I am very proud to announce the first public release of: Carrington Build, an elegant page layout system for WordPress and Carrington Business, a theme that showcases Carrington Build.
Carrington Build allows you to build rich, complex page layouts without any coding or editing of page templates. Sound too good to be true? Based on the response from our clients that are using it and the top WordPress developers I’ve demo’ed to – that’s exactly what we’ve created.
Click the Build tab when creating a page and then you can add rows with different layout structures and add modules to those rows. All with the ease of drag-and-drop for editing and re-ordering. Real drag-and-drop page layouts, tightly integrated into WordPress!
We’ve set up a demo site where you can experience the way Carrington Build works on both the front-end and the back-end. The demo is reset every hour, so go nuts and experiment. Don’t worry about breaking anything.
Over the last year, our entire Crowd Favorite team has worked on Carrington Build. We’ve worked very hard to create not only a polished end result, but an elegantly architected and extensible system that we can mold as needed for real life implementations.
Carrington Build has been tested and proven in a number of projects for our clients and for our own site. During that time we have conceptualized features, implemented them, revised them and refined them. We’ve taken the original working system we used in our first implementation and improved it month by month.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is one of the biggest innovations we’ve seen for WordPress. Perhaps I’m most excited about how wide it opens the door to what developers can create; the power we can give our users.
We believe that the approach we use in creating a working, sustainable CMS implementation for our clients works well as a best practice. As you might imagine, Carrington Build fits nicely into this approach.
When we work with a client we consult with them to define requirements, then follow up with wireframes, hi-fi designs and finally implementation. Fairly typical. What isn’t as typical is the way we approach the wireframes and hi-fi designs.
We work hard to distill the design down to re-usable building blocks. Once those are determined, we create a way to implement and leverage these building blocks as an extension of the CMS – in our case, within WordPress. We create a system that is totally maintainable by our client and give them the tools to extend their site as future needs dictate (with components that work elegantly together).
Our approach: build CMS-driven sites by creating styled structure and elements that work elegantly together, then give our clients the tools to manage them. We want repeat business from our clients in the form of new feature development and implementation of new ideas, not for website content maintenance.
As you can see here, our own website utilizes a small palette of styled content islands for callouts, calls to action, sidebar elements, etc. We distilled a larger list from a series of page comps, then consolidated down to what you see here.
We’ve shipped Carrington Build with a collection of rich custom modules that comprise a nice set of these building blocks – with the ability to choose your desired module style treatment. You can drop in a hero area, an image, a featured post, the latest post with excerpt from a post type, category, tag or by a certain author… or a standard WordPress component like a shortcode, a widget, a sidebar or a menu.
Here is a list of the modules that Carrington Build currently ships with:
- Callout
- Divider
- Gallery
- Heading
- Hero
- HTML
- Image
- Loop
- Notice
- Plain Text
- Post Callout
- Pull Quote
- Rich Text
- Shortcode
- Sidebar
- Sub-Pages
- Widget
Learn more about Carrington Build modules.
We created Carrington Build on top of WordPress best practices. We have implemented everything using existing WordPress tables and standard hooks. While we store the custom module data structures in custom fields, each module implements an interface that returns a textual value. We take these values and put them together so that things like built-in search and excerpts can continue to work as expected. Many folks will never care (nor should they need to) about the elegance under the hood, but it’s that extra effort that creates a long-term viable and maintainable platform.
Like the Carrington theme framework, Carrington Build is a 100% additive implementation. We augment existing WordPress functionality, we don’t replace it, subvert it or break it.
Carrington Build Developer Edition (single site) is available for purchase and download for developers who want to integrate Build to a site for a client. We are also offering a royalty edition for theme developers that want to create new or augment existing commercial themes that integrate Carrington Build. If that’s you, get in touch and we can discuss details.
Naturally, we’ve got a long list of future enhancements we are excited to add to Carrington Build in the near future, but after a year+ of development I thought people might appreciate it if we stopped long enough to put together a public release. I promise we’ll do more of this going forward. 😉
In order to showcase Carrington Build and provide an example of how to integrate it tightly into a theme, we’ve created the Carrington Business theme, which includes Carrington Build and is also available today for purchase and download.
Since the Carrington Business theme introduces new, advanced features with the addition of Carrington Build, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for our customers to experiment and get comfortable with the features that are available to them. To do this, we have included a sample data file (WXR format) that can be imported and includes the data we have staged on the demo site. Simply import the sample data into a new WordPress installation and you have a populated sample site with great examples that you can edit to your heart’s content.
The Carrington Business theme has a pragmatic implementation of forward-compatible HTML5 markup that is semantic, loads quickly and is SEO and human-friendly. It also includes a child theme with an alternate color scheme to provide a roadmap for creating your own custom child themes and custom colors.
The Carrington Business theme is built on top of the Carrington theme framework for easy customization of views based on the data in your site. We’ve included a few examples of this like blog templates and the News custom post type and matching templates. There is support for menus with smart fallbacks when menus haven’t been created and miscellaneous features like a footer that supports widgets and a setting for showing a log in/log out link in the footer.
The Carrington framework makes it easy for anyone to create customized, reactive structured views in a WordPress theme. Carrington Build adds the ability to create advanced drag-and-drop page layouts for unstructured data pages.
As you can likely tell, I’m quite excited that we’ve finally gotten Carrington Build and the Carrington Business theme to market. I’m looking forward to seeing the creative ways that people use and integrate what we’ve built to create new websites and themes that allow people to use and customize WordPress on a whole new level.
This post is part of the following projects: Carrington Build, FaveBusiness. View the project timelines for more context on this post.
This post is part of the following projects: Carrington Build, FaveBusiness. View the project timelines for more context on this post.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Alex King, Chris O'Rourke, Chris O'Rourke, blognews, web dev fools and others. web dev fools said: Alex King: Introducing Carrington Build http://bit.ly/9E3anv #wordpress […]
The demo admin user doesn’t have admin privileges sufficient to test this out.
I just created a test post as the demo user and verified that I can edit existing pages. Looks fine to me.
very cool on many levels, and even though I am paying for more and more premium tools in wordpress these days, that developer price does give me a bit of sticker shock. Going to have to think about the pros and cons of being able to do some of these things quick and faster. Curious about how this works through wordpress upgrades in general as well as how it works with a number of other plugins…… hmmmmmmmmmmmmm
The cost of the Developer Edition (Single Site) should be passed on to the client you are building the site for. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that being able to add all of the features of Build for $499 isn’t a bargain. I know developer rates vary, but that’s typically less than 1 day of billable time.
Wow, you just took it to a whole new level. I’m an ASP.NET guy who only dabbles in WordPress but this might change things!
Awesome looking Plugin, I’m defiantly checking this out right now. Gracias @Phil for the share!
After using the demo, I like how the plugin functions and it looks very intuitive. The icons are amazing looking and flow well with the WP admin interface. This is truly an impressive build and am looking forward to see what’s coming out in the future.
wow.
this is huge.
I don’t think you are exaggerating either by saying this is one of the biggest innovations we’ve seen around WordPress in a long time. Matt & Co. should hurry up and just buy you out and stick this in WordPress by default 🙂
[…] spotted a tweet from Andrew Nacin this evening mentioning a new project from Alex King which has just gone live called Carringon […]
Alex! Congrats!
I remember Devin or Shawn talking about this at WCSF and it definitely peaked interest but seeing it in action–I’m blown away. This is something we’ve all needed for a while now and it means a lot coming from your team.
The attention you should be getting for this should propel the carrington framework, which is great for me too :).
Thanks for pushing WP and helping the developer community.
Regarding prices:
Even though it will be easy for me to pass the costs onto the client I’m wondering if the developer license needs some more thought. Just because I’d imagine a few developers purchasing the business theme and stripping Build out to use in their own theme. Even if I purchase Business to start my next project it’s cheaper and as restrictive as getting a dev’ Build license to place into my custom JAM build. Maybe Business should be $499 and Build should be $199. Unless I’m missing something and Build has more features stand-alone.
Regardless of what you decide I’ll be supporting your work.
Cheers!
Dan, I think it’s a matter of audience. We expect end-users to purchase the $149 theme and we expect developers working on paid projects to purchase the $499 developer edition. I think that both price points are very fair.
@Alex, I’m following and I’ll be purchasing accordingly. I just hope others see the value and do the same.
… off to market this to some clients.
Oh yeah, so what’s next? Category Builds would be awesome.
Oh, I see it now. The stuff is in a tab. I didn’t get that this is a layout inside a page inside a theme. I thought it was an addition to the theme and was looking for it there.
Take a quick look at the videos (they’re short) – that will help explain how things work.
Wow. Such a great piece of work guys.
Any chance this will coming to posts as well. That is where I need formatting the most.
Great work!
It supports all post types (developers can filter the types they want it enabled on), we just have it enabled for pages in the Carrington Business theme. We actually have it enabled for posts on several client sites. When enabling for posts there are a few things to consider, probably a good discussion for the forums.
Excellent Alex. Thanks for the info.
This is absolutely amazing! I am a new WordPress User, but I think this is great. After reading and trying WordPress out, I pay close attention everything surrounding it. I may be a bit wet around the ears, but I can definetly tell this is going to be great! I agree with Ed! Please let WordPress add this as a default! Great work and God Bless your continuing projects.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Best of WordPress, Melody Newkirk. Melody Newkirk said: RT @BestOfWordPress: Introducing Carrington Build http://bit.ly/db6HWM […]
Hello Alex,
Well done. Great design and execution.
As a theme designer I am undecided about how useful it can actually be:
– On the one hand it makes my work easier and probably much cleaner then any manual code I would write.
– On the other hand it is another burden when it comes to teaching customers how to work with it. Teaching customers (at least my customers) to work with WordPress is challenging enough as is, without the added weight of something like this.
I would want to explore two directions with this:
– Establishing a “Designer Friendly” framework – empowering designers to create great themes without or with little code. But then presenting it properly to end users (hiding unnecessary complexity).
– Adding a “magical” CSS styling layer to it. I’d be happy to share some thoughts on this with you.
Great to see such a mature solution for WordPress. I have great respect for your patience in letting mature over years. Patience leads to quality.
All Things Good
Ronen
I think that there’s a bit of test data leftover in the template. Click on “About” and you get the text “My ass”
I have zero WordPress experience, but it looks like nice work though.
[…] Introducing Carrington Build | alexking.org Today Qlex King introduces Carrington Build to us: a new way to build custom pages on WordPress, thanks to a really complete and detailed interface that gets integrated into your admin panel. Have a look at the video and read the whole article, it explains everything in details. (tags: development theme wordpress) […]
[…] via Introducing Carrington Build | alexking.org. […]
Only question so far is: How usable is the system/theme for someone who relies on assistive technology (i.e. screen-readers etc)?
Congrats on new concept to build the pages but I want to see another option to build categories and single templates. We would like to set each category using thumbnails or excerpt w thumbnails in rows or grid style.
Building single templates (building posts) is supported, but not exposed in the Carrington Business theme as the feature typically needs to be customized for a specific site’s needs.
That sounds like a great theme feature, but I’m not sure that Build is the right tool for the job there. Creating templates with the Carrington framework is probably easier since custom styling will be needed.
As an example, we did this on in the Carrington Showcase:
http://carringtonthe[...]ry/showcase/
and our Portfolio page:
http://crowdfavorite.com/portfolio/
Wow!
I will really go trough all that tomorrow.
But I think that you might right: this is the biggest improvement made on WordPress. Simply the missing CMS with modules.
I got a lot of questions, that will come, but right the only one coming too my mind is: Is it compatible with QTranslate?
Also I am a bit confuse about the Build developer and Framework version. What are the main difference and feature?
Anyway. Thanks a lot for this huge work.
Alex, this is a fantastic product you have on your hands. I have a quick question which, for tl;dr, I probably didn’t catch in the article, but is there support in Carrington Build for third-party modules?
Creating modules isn’t difficult and Build definitely supports additional custom modules (we do this for client projects all the time). Think widgets on steroids.
[…] few days ago, Alex King announced a new WordPress product called Carrington Build. It is described as a “better way to manage […]
Wow, I’ve always thought this stuff is too complicated to do or cost too much to do. Sounds like a good deal!
[…] all over it. It’d be nice to review it and see just how nifty its promises are, given that it’s only been available since August 3rd. Share […]
I’m puzzled on a few points that don’t seem to be clarified by the FAQ:
– If I purchase the Business theme, can I modify it to support Build in regular posts as well as pages? If yes, is this straightforward, or does it require deep WP knowledge? I can’t ask this on the forums since I don’t have access prior to buying, and using Build on posts is the critical condition of buying for me.
– Can I freely modify various aspects of the Business theme for my own use (such as styles, fonts etc.)?
The change is straightforward to enable Build on posts. I think it’s noted in our documentation, and we can provide assistance for how to make the change in our forums.
Of course. We even include a child theme to give you an example for how to do this.